In These Timeshttp://inthesetimes.com/
In These Times features award-winning investigative reporting about corporate malfeasance and government wrongdoing.Why Keith Ellison and Jeremy Corbyn Think We Should Cap CEO Payhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21114/maximum-wage-keith-ellison-jeremy-corbyn-income-ceo-pay/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21114/maximum-wage-keith-ellison-jeremy-corbyn-income-ceo-pay/max·i·mum in·come

noun

1. A legal limit on how much a person can be paid

"Give [the wealthy] awards. Lavish them with praise. Publish the names of the highest taxpayers in laudatory newspaper columns. Allow them to bask in civic pride. But take their money. They have plenty.” — Hamilton Nolan, arguing in Gawker that all income above $5 million a year be taxed at 99 percent

I get why we'd want to raise the minimum wage. But why lower the maximum?

According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO compensation at the 350 highest-revenue publicly traded firms rose 875 percent from 1978 to 2012. Meanwhile, average worker pay at these companies grew a mere 5 percent.

In a world where so many struggle to get by, it’s easy to resent executives making millions. If companies spent less on CEOs, they might put profits toward increasing wages for everyday workers, paying more in taxes or investing in something else useful.

The real trouble with inequality, however, goes deeper than the misallocation of resources or the resentment it creates. It perverts the promise of democracy itself. So long as a tiny minority hoards most of the wealth, these oligarchs are able to exert disproportionate social and political influence.

So how would this actually work?

There are a few different ways to go about it. One would be to pick a limit— some suggest $5 million a year, others $500,000—and tax everything above that at or near 100 percent.

Another would be to incentivize worker pay raises by tying executive salary to employee income. In 2013, a Swiss referendum proposed a 12-to-1 ratio on the logic that a CEO shouldn’t make more in a month than an employee in a year. (It lost, but garnered 35 percent support.) In an In These Timesinterview, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) suggested a less strict 20-to-1 ratio.

This would have been typical in 1965, but today the average ratio is more than 200- to-1. J.C. Penney once hit 1,795-to-1.

Who else is calling for this?

U.K. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and French socialist Jean-Luc Melenchón have both voiced support. Back in 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt suggested a wartime cap at $25,000 a year, around $400,000 in today’s dollars. (He settled for an 88 percent tax rate above $200,000.) If a 100 percent top tax rate sounds out there, remember we had 90 percent under the Republican Eisenhower administration.

These calls challenge us to reckon with extreme inequality and question why, exactly, we consider certain people so much more deserving than others. As a certain German Communist once suggested, perhaps compensation should be “to each, according to his needs.”

]]>Dayton MartindaleTue, 29 May 2018 20:59:00 +0000Verizon. Pfizer. Bank of America. U.S. Corporations Are Funding Israeli Settlements.http://inthesetimes.com/article/21752/israel-settlements-palestine-verizon-pfizer-bank-of-america-jpmorgan-chase/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21752/israel-settlements-palestine-verizon-pfizer-bank-of-america-jpmorgan-chase/The corporate foundations of Verizon, Pfizer, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, American Express and JPMorgan Chase have collectively given over $25,000 to U.S. nonprofits that send money to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, according to tax records from 2001 to 2016 reviewed by In These Times.

A large network of U.S. nonprofits raises millions of dollars annually to send to Israeli settlements, which are built on Palestinian land and are considered illegal under international law. Some Israeli settlers violently harass Palestinians and burn down their crops. Israeli settlers have also killed Palestinians.

Tax records reviewed by In These Times show that Israeli settlements have a surprising source of funds: the foundations of some of the most well-known U.S. corporations.

In addition, the corporate foundations of Verizon, Pfizer, Deutsche Bank, American Express and JPMorgan Chase have collectively given over $48,000 to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, a U.S. nonprofit that sends millions of dollars to Israel’s military to support various enrichment activities—like education programs and recreational and cultural centers at army bases for soldiers.

Most of these funds come from corporate donations that match the donations of individual employees, though for some donations—all of Verizon’s and JP Morgan Chase’s in 2005, 2015 and 2016—it is not specified if the payments are matching grants. The corporate foundations encourage employee donations to nonprofits by promising that the companies will match donations to the nonprofits of their choice, doubling the total amount of money that go to those nonprofits.

It’s unclear whether the corporate foundations are aware their money is flowing to Israeli settlements built in defiance of international law. None of the corporations contacted by In These Times about these donations responded to requests for comment.

The vast majority of the donations from these corporations flow to relatively uncontroversial groups, like universities.

Corporations give money to charitable causes to boost their own image, allowing them to portray themselves as altruistic philanthropists rather than rapacious capitalists. Corporations typically fund their own foundations, which gives them an added benefit: a tax deduction.

But the donations to Israeli settlements draw the corporations into perhaps the most controversial conflict in the world, and seem to contradict pledges made by some of these foundations to fund charities that advance social justice and don’t discriminate. “We do not provide funding to any organization that discriminates based on race, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, veteran, or disability status or espouses hate,” states Bank of America, in a statement on their website explaining what groups their Charitable Foundation Matching Gifts program supports.

Some Israeli settlers use violence against Palestinians, burning olive trees and killing civilians. In October 2018, Israeli settlers threw stones at a Palestinian car, smashing through a window and killing Aisha Rabi, a 47-year-old Palestinian mother of eight.

Settlers have also carried out stonings, Molotov cocktail attacks and beatings against Palestinians. Israeli settlements, and the infrastructure built to support them, block Palestinian freedom of movement, forcing Palestinians to take circuitous routes because they are barred from using the fastest routes on roads Israel built to benefit settlers. And Palestinians living in the occupied territories are barred from living in Israeli settlements.

Close observers of how settlements fundraise in the United States will notice some familiar names in the tax documents of these corporate foundations. Most of the donations go to large, wealthy organizations that raise the bulk of pro-settler cash in the United States.

The corporate foundations of Verizon, Pfizer, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, American Express and JPMorgan Chase have together given over $15,000 to the One Israel Fund, a non-profit that gives cash to settlements across the occupied West Bank, including to settler security guards that harass Palestinians and block their freedom of movement. The corporate foundations of Pfizer, American Express and JPMorgan Chase have also given over $6,300 to the Central Fund of Israel, a non-profit that also sends millions of dollars to Israel, including large amounts to West Bank settlements. The Central Fund of Israel has drawn criticism for providing financial support to Honenu, a group that gives money to Israeli Jewish prisoners convicted of abusing or killing Palestinians.

In addition to funding illegal settlements, both the One Israel Fund and the Central Fund of Israel donated to a secretive Israeli government-linked initiative to attack the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, a global, Palestinian-led campaign calling for an end to Israel’s occupation, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel. According toThe Forward, the secretive initiative “will fund information gathering, influence campaigns, [and] pro-Israel advocacy,” though it’s unclear if the program has launched. The One Israel Fund and Central Fund of Israel also fund Im Tirtzu, an far-right Israeli nationalist movement that harasses Israeli leftists.

The corporate foundations have also given to smaller nonprofits that raise money for specific settlements or institutions.

The foundations of Verizon, Deutsche Bank and Pfizer sent nearly $1,500 to the American Friends of Yeshivot Bnei Akiva, a group that raises money for a network of religious Zionist schools across Israel and the occupied West Bank and Golan Heights.

In 2004, the Pfizer foundation gave $500 to American Friends of Bet El Yeshiva Center, a nonprofit run for many years by David Friedman, now the U.S. ambassador to Israel, that supports the settlement of Bet El, which sits deep in the occupied West Bank.

And the corporate foundations of JPMorgan Chase, Pfizer and Verizon have sent nearly $1,000 to the nonprofit American Friends of Elon Moreh, which supports the settlement of Elon Moreh, a community with a reputation for harassing Palestinian farmers.

“Foundations have to take responsibility and ownership over gifts that pass through them, whether through matching funds, donor-led giving, or other methods,” says Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, which advocates for Palestinian rights. “Groups that are clearly violating international human rights and international law should not be receiving corporate gifts.”

]]>Alex KaneThu, 21 Feb 2019 17:01:00 +0000Open Borders, Without Apologyhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21753/open-borders-donald-trump-freedom-of-movement-democrats-free-trade/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21753/open-borders-donald-trump-freedom-of-movement-democrats-free-trade/When President Donald Trump claimed in his State of the Union Address that “wealthy politicians and donors push for open borders, while living their lives behind walls and gates and guards,” it was his latest of countless efforts to accuse Democrats and liberals of being “soft” on migration.

Like the entirety of Trump’s speech, this claim was misleading and outright false on many levels.

The notion, for example, that “liberal elites” support open borders while a billionaire president defends the working class from the migrant “threat” is outrageous. Among the many problems with the argument is that it ignores — or rather, intentionally obscures — the fact that the U.S. working class itself is composed in significant part by millions of migrants.

Far from immigrants being outsiders who endanger the working class of this country, they are part of its fabric — far more so than Donald Trump, who was born wealthy, ever was.

But Trump’s main argument, that there are those on the liberal end of Washington’s political class who advocate for free migration across borders, is simply a lie.

As the New York Times pointed out last year, the Democratic Party has repeatedly and expressly condemned open borders in word and supported border militarization in deed. In fact, Stacey Abrams distanced herself from the position immediately after Trump’s speech in the Democratic response, asserting that “compassionate treatment is not the same as open borders” and promising that “Democrats stand ready to effectively secure our ports and borders.”

A genuine call for open borders is virtually absent from the debate between the White House and Capitol Hill, where the question has been not whether to militarize the border, but merely how many billions of dollars should be devoted to “border security,” or what specific physical infrastructure it should buy.

But open borders is more than an epithet for the right to attack its opponents with. It is a legitimate position, and the left should take it up as the only humane one.

Catching up with capital

For decades, critics of globalization have pointed out that the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization—institutions that are shaped and dominated by the United States—have helped create a world where capital moves freely, while human beings are stuck at borders. Numerous “free trade” agreements have accelerated this trend.

As asylum seekers at the border confront metal barriers, surveillance drones and armed guards barring their entry, trucks, trains and boats bring a high volume of shipping containers into the United States each day. Ports of entry have perfected clearing these goods through customs efficiently, and policy makers have regulated (and deregulated) international commerce to make the process as easy as possible.

If only the people migrating from Central America and elsewhere were commodities instead of human beings, they would enter the United States painlessly, be handled with care by workers who are experts at transferring goods quickly and carefully, and then transported overnight to all corners of the country through extensive commercial distribution networks.

Commercial goods aren’t the only things that move freely across borders. The U.S. military carries out operations all over the world with such regularity that it’s not even considered newsworthy in the United States.

It’s bitterly ironic that Trump constantly describes migrants in the Central American Exodus as an “invasion,” when the United States has carried out so many actual invasions of that region — operations which bear great responsibility for destabilizing those societies and pushing so many people to come north in the first place.

The right to movement

Systems and governments that invest tremendously in perfecting the movement of commerce and violence across borders, while investing at similar scale to stop the movement of people, aren’t being simply hypocritical. They’re also violating a fundamental human right.

People have the right to move freely. Human migration, and migration particular to the Americas, predates the United States or its borders. Indeed, many of the people coming north from Central America are Indigenous, belonging to groups of people whose histories stretch far before that of the U.S. nation-state.

The right to freedom of movement becomes only more important as growing numbers of people become uprooted and displaced. Conflicts over control of the planet’s resources, economic policies that devastate people the world over, and climate change — which creates more disasters and makes parts of the world uninhabitable for everyday life—are all increasing.

With those dynamics, the responsibility of governments to honor people’s freedom to move only grows, too—as does that of ordinary people to defend that right.

New political possibilities

We are living in a time, not only of darkness and repression, but also political possibility.

Medicare for All, previously a marginalized demand in the United States (though existing in practice throughout much of the world) is now a central demand of mainstream liberal politics.

The slogan “Abolish ICE”—first raised by grassroots migrant justice activists and lifted up by the Democratic Socialists of America—has been brought into official U.S. politics and even carried onto Capitol Hill by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The slogan has become so potent that the president and vice president have had to go out of their way to denounce it—something Trump did again in the most recent State of the Union.

These facts — evidence of a complicated political terrain, but one that has much promise for progressives and the left — show why supporting “border security” rather than centering the rights of migrants in the conversation about migration is not only wrong. It’s also out of step with the progressive trend in U.S. politics.

While demanding open borders may seem like a marginal position in U.S. politics now, keep in mind that “build the wall” was on the fringe until recently.

The right wing has been audacious in upsetting mainstream sensibilities regarding the treatment of asylum seekers, calling for—and enacting through the White House—the separation of migrant families and mass detention of migrants, all in highly public ways. It has also flouted U.S. law in using Mexico as a holding cell for asylum seekers, rather than honoring their right to enter the U.S. and to due process for asylum applications once here. And Trump has even called for the end of birthright citizenship, targeting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, won by Black people in the U.S. following the Civil War.

We should match—and go beyond—their boldness, in defending the right to migrate as fundamental to humanity. We should be calling for open the borders, without apology.

]]>Khury Petersen-SmithThu, 21 Feb 2019 13:10:00 +0000U.S. Invasion of Venezuela Would Be a Nightmare for Its Peoplehttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21751/venezuela_maduro_trump_military_aid_colombia_aggression_guaido/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21751/venezuela_maduro_trump_military_aid_colombia_aggression_guaido/On Monday, Trump issued an ultimatum to Venezuela’s troops. Either defect and back Juan Guaidó the United States’ man in Venezuela, or suffer.

“If you choose this path, you will find no safe harbor, no easy exit, and no way out. You will lose everything,” he said during a speech, while he was visiting with the Venezuelan community in Miami.

It’s the latest in a slow-moving U.S. effort to topple Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, that has seen the United States back National Assembly president Juan Guaidó in his grab for the presidency, and impose a second round of devastating sanctions on Venezuela, blocking it from crucial oil revenue from sales in the United States.

The latest phase of the coup centers on tons of humanitarian aid that the United States is trying to force into the country. Over the weekend, U.S. military C-17 cargo planes landed in Colombia carrying aid for Venezuela. It’s the second attempt by the United States to carry aid into the country, a move the UN has warned against and which Venezuela sees as laying the groundwork for a U.S. military deployment.

Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, who is wary of the true U.S. intentions, has refused to allow the assistance across the border. Juan Guaidó has said the aid will enter Venezuela on February 23, and has called on Venezuelans to mobilize across the country and form aid "caravans" and a "humanitarian avalanche" at the borders.

This is setting the scene for conflict. And that is exactly what the United States and Guaidó are looking for.

“Any actions by the Venezuelan military to condone or instigate violence against peaceful civilians at the Colombian and Brazilian borders will not be forgotten. Leaders still have time to make the right choice,” White House National Security Advisor John Bolton tweeted on Tuesday night, as if laying out the future justification for a response from the United States or its Colombia allies.

Using humanitarian aid as a weapon

Both the United Nations and the Red Cross warned the United States against using aid deliveries to Venezuela as a political tool. “Humanitarian action needs to be independent of political, military or other objectives,” UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters in New York in early February.

Venezuela does accept international support. The Red Cross doubled its budget for Venezuela in recent weeks to 18 million Swiss francs. Maduro announced that 300 tons of medicine and other aid would arrive from Russia on Wednesday, although this has been barely been mentioned in the U.S. media.

As Adam Johnson pointed out earlier this month for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the U.S. aid is nothing more than a P.R. stunt. If the United States wanted to send aid to Venezuela, it would be doing it through the Red Cross and another organizations that are already working in the country, with the consent of the Maduro government.

Instead it is looking to create conflict.

"The cost of this blockade is over 30 billion dollars,” Venezuelan foreign minister Jorge Arreaza told reporters at the United Nations, referring to the cost of the U.S. sanctions. "And they're sending this so-called 'humanitarian aid' for 20 million dollars? So what is this? I'm choking you, I'm killing you, and then I'm giving you a cookie?”

In the 1980s, the United States used aid shipments to shuttle weapons into the hands of Contras, who were trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. The man responsible for those shipments was Elliott Abrams, Trump’s new special representative for Venezuela.

Showdown at the border

Now British billionaire Richard Branson is weighing in. He is planning to hold a Live Aid-inspired concert on Friday in Cucuta, along the Venezuelan-Colombian border, the day before Guaidó’s deadline. He says his goal is to raise more money for aid and to get the shipments across. He admitted that the show came at the request of Guaidó and opposition leader Leopoldo López.

But Maduro says the United States is using the supposed humanitarian crisis as a pretext for military intervention.

This comes several weeks after Bolton appeared at a White House press briefing with a yellow clipboard on which the words “5,000 troops to Colombia,” were written.

Colombian president Ivan Duque was in Washington last week to discuss the Venezuelan situation with Donald Trump. He has called for Maduro to step down and has recognized Guaidó as interim president, though he has been tight-lipped about the question of whether he would allow U.S. troops into the country from which to launch a potential invasion of Venezuela.

“What I can say is that we are working actively, decidedly, for the liberation of the Venezuelan people,” Duque told Bricio Segovia, a journalist with the U.S.-government news service Voice of America.

Last week, Cuba accused the United States of sending special forces Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands with the goal of toppling President Nicolas Maduro.

U.S. media have been helping to build the case for invasion by repeating the U.S. government line on Venezuela and failing to point out the complexities of the crisis. Bloomberg went so far as to propose that perhaps there are positive invasions after all. It published an article on Saturday titled “In Venezuela's Backyard, Here's a U.S. Invasion That Ended Well,” which tried to paint the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama as an example where U.S. military intervention has gone right.

The article left out the death and destruction. The estimated 3,500 killed. The Panama City neighborhood El Chorrillo was so wiped out that ambulance drivers called it "Little Hiroshima.” A truth commission had to be set up to investigate the facts.

Trump’s rhetoric on Venezuela seems to point toward justifying military action by the United States or its proxies. “We want to restore Venezuelan democracy," Trump told Venezuelans in Miami. “The twilight hour of socialism has arrived in Venezuela and frankly in many many places around the world.”

Any resolution to the crisis by force will not end well. If the the United States goes down this path, it will mean mean devastation for Venezuela and its citizens. Violent intervention could easily unleash a bloody civil war that would have repercussions across the region. Ironically, the louder Trump barks, the less support the United States is going to have in Venezuela for any action it might take. Dictating demands in the name of the Venezuelan people will not resolve the impasse in Venezuela. It will only make it worse.

]]>Michael FoxWed, 20 Feb 2019 21:55:00 +0000Lots of Presidential Candidates Talk a Good Talk. Look at Their Records Instead.http://inthesetimes.com/article/21721/presidential-candidates-records-2020-rhetoric-democratic-party/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21721/presidential-candidates-records-2020-rhetoric-democratic-party/As Democratic Party voters have moved left, so have the prospective 2020 Democratic presidential nominees. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who once criticized Barack Obama for being too harsh on private equity firms, is now proposing massive new taxes on inheritance and capital gains in order to finance a large-scale reduction in wealth inequality. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) confesses she is “embarrassed” by her past fearmongering about immigrants, now aligning with the movement to abolish ICE.

Voters will face a difficult question: If all or most of the Democratic candidates endorse a progressive agenda, who can actually be trusted to fight for that agenda once in office? Every politician makes promises. We know, however, that many will disappoint. Once in office, a president will have to resist pressure coming from many powerful interest groups. Without access to the candidate’s inner psychology, it’s tough to know which promises they’re committed to fulfilling.

One obvious clue as to what a person would do as president: their record. Have they spent their lives fighting for the causes they say they believe in? Or do they seem to shift positions depending on which way they perceive the political wind to be blowing?

In selecting candidates for the most powerful office on Earth, records should be treated as a resume. We can’t just look at their “job interviews”— speeches and platforms. We have to examine what they’ve actually spent their life doing, and whether they have exhibited the values and commitment that suggest they will live up to their promises.

This doesn’t mean that a candidate must have an unblemished history. It’s permissible to evolve as one gets more information. But if someone spent most of their life advancing an agenda objectionable to progressives, and then shifts position when the electorate begins to favor progressive policies, that doesn’t speak well for their moral compass. The only kind of person who can be trusted to hold up against special interests is one who has shown repeatedly that they feel their convictions to their core.

One could argue that personal qualities are altogether overemphasized, that the platform matters more than the person. Indeed, there is some political science research suggesting as much. However, platforms do not become policy unless elected officials fight to implement them, which means voters need to know that they’ve elected someone who is as good a fighter as they are a talker.

For example, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is responsible for building one of the most valuable of all federal agencies, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It fights large banks and returns billions of dollars to defrauded consumers. This record gives us some confidence that Warren means what she says when she proposes a wealth tax or an employee co-determination scheme.

Democratic voters may also have had a better sense of how recent presidents would govern if they had scrutinized the first years of candidates’ political lives. As early as 1996, political scientist Adolph Reed warned that Barack Obama, then a state senator, had “vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics,” and that his “fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program.”

But at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the country fell in love with Obama’s words, and his longstanding tendency to favor “process over program” was overlooked. Indeed, the traits Reed identified—using the rhetoric of community to paper over a lack of real action—turned out to be the central weakness of Obama as president. He showed far more of an interest in “bringing people together” than in taking on the powerful, and appointed a “Goldman Sachs” government featuring architects of neoliberal economic policy such as Larry Summers. If one had taken seriously Obama’s anti-Wall Street rhetoric in 2008, one might have been surprised by this. If one had looked at his long career of caution and centrism (as Reed did), this was exactly what one would have expected.

Voters are going to have to choose carefully in 2020. Based on current polling, it seems as if several Democratic candidates could beat Trump, including Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Joe Biden.

But beating Trump is only the first task. The second task is to implement a progressive agenda—a must, considering that the deterioration of U.S. civic and economic life predates Trump. Voters need to demand candidates whose life trajectories and past actions make it clear that they have more to offer than politically convenient sound bites.

Successful politicians take positions that people and movements organize around and get out the vote for. But it’s not always clear which positions are rooted in conviction and which are a matter of calculation. Does it matter?

This question is relevant today, since many of the Democrats planning a presidential bid have been out of sync with the party’s progressive base on a range of issues. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), for instance, is busy distancing herself from herself on immigration, circa 2008, when she called for English to be the official national language and for “the removal of illegal aliens by expanding detention capacity.” Those positions “certainly weren’t empathetic and they were not kind,” Gillibrand said recently.

And Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has been an aggressive foreign policy hawk on Iran and Israel, once claiming that the first responsibility of Congress is “to protect Americans from terrorism.” But Warren has recently tried to shift left, giving a speech that called for ending the war in Afghanistan and the scaling back of U.S. military commitments.

Their records in these realms are significant red flags. In truth, though, there are plenty of disappointments in the records of all the major candidates. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) has been grilled for her time as California’s attorney general during its peak “tough on crime” years, when she resisted the release of prisoners to relieve overcrowding. And, although Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) favors cutting the military budget, he faithfully supports the F-35 jet program, a trillion-dollar sinkhole of waste and corruption that creates jobs for Vermont.

No candidate is perfect, and it is a win worth celebrating when erstwhile hawks and centrists like Warren and Gillibrand tack leftward in order to galvanize movements and compete in elections. Ideas must be debated and taken seriously before they can be translated into policy. But can we trust politicians when they claim, conveniently, to see the light?

The question has a quasi-religious undertone, as if trust should be reserved for the truly redeemed. But this is politics, not religion. It’s about power, not purity.

It’s easy to be cynical about candidate platforms and speeches, yet the evidence suggests that political promises usually are not hollow. They actually do guide what politicians do (or attempt to do) with their power.

And that’s one reason the recent rush to the left among the Democratic candidates is so important. It may be strictly rhetorical, given that the party is out of power (except in the House). But it puts them on the record, creates a basis for accountability and shapes their priorities. We should trust their leftward shifts if we understand trust as something provisionally granted. Our goal isn’t to discern the purity of hearts, but to choose the candidate most likely to prioritize and actually push through a broad and aggressive agenda.

That candidate isn’t necessarily the one with the most consistent record. To cite an example from the other side, Donald Trump’s late-life conversion on the abortion issue is deeply suspicious. Yet he couldn’t be more servile to the priorities of antichoice conservatives. And by stacking the courts with far-right judges, he is serving their interests very well.

The politics of abortion is, in fact, exhibit A in the case for pragmatism. In the late 1970s, it was becoming the conservative movement’s most potent organizing weapon— what Medicare for All is right now for progressives. But the GOP’s presidential candidate in 1980, Ronald Reagan, had a less-than-trustworthy record on the issue. He signed a bill in 1967, as governor of California, that expanded abortion rights, and he never showed much personal commitment to evangelical Christianity.

But opposition to abortion was a key part of Reagan’s 1980 campaign (and subsequent presidency), and social conservatives gave him their enthusiastic support.

The payoff? Reagan became the most effective tool in the last half century for advancing not just antichoice politics, but the whole right-wing agenda. He built the movement’s power, and vice versa, with consequences that are still unfolding: hollowedout unions, off-the-charts inequality, a shrinking public sphere and narrowing reproductive rights.

What was truly in Reagan’s heart in the late 1970s, when he courted social conservatives? Was he motivated by genuine antichoice zeal, or just a need for the votes and organizing power that the movement could deliver?

In an interview with CBS This Morning on Tuesday, Sanders told co-host John Dickerson that he planned to launch a massive grassroots effort to transform “the economic and political life of this country," adding: "We're gonna win."

Unlike his last run in 2016, however, this time Sanders will join a large field of Democratic candidates who have expressed support for a suite of his signature policies: Medicare for All, tuition-free college, campaign finance reform and taxing the wealthy to improve the lot of the middle and working classes. Since 2016, the political gravity in the Democratic Party has shifted toward Sanders to an astounding degree. With his entry into the race, the Democratic field is likely to be the most left-wing in modern American history.

How did this happen? How did the Democratic Party’s long, timid hangover from Reaganism suddenly end? How did Sanders, long a political oddity in DC—a self-described socialist throughout the Cold War years, who visited the Soviet Union for his honeymoon in 1988; who resisted the call of Clintonite triangulation; who railed against economic inequality when most Democrats were cozying up to big business—manage to realign the Democratic solar system around his set of solidly left-wing policies?

A common misconception about Sanders’ 2016 campaign was that he “promised” a political revolution—a wave of civic action that would sweep away the forces of reaction and their billionaire backers in DC, inaugurating a new era of egalitarian policymaking. But Bernie’s “political revolution” was never a promise, it was a plea.

Bernie was endlessly criticized for over-promising during his campaign, ignoring the pragmatic policy questions in favor of attractive rhetoric. “You have people, I believe, who do not understand how hard it is to make change,” then Sen. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said of Sanders supporters in April 2016, “the importance of not just being idealistic, but being sensibly pragmatic and keeping their ideals.”

But contrary to the perception of his centrist critics, the Sanders campaign was the most honest in recent memory. Hillary Clinton’s more incremental demands were no more possible in a GOP-controlled Congress than Sanders’ more ambitious agenda. What Sanders told his supporters was the truth: Without a wholesale reordering of the political status quo—only possible when massive numbers of previously unengaged people take to the streets, the polls and the picket lines—nothing in his agenda could be achieved.

In other words, if you want substantive progressive change, but believe we can get there without a massive social movement, you are the idealist.

This was the lesson of Sanders’ 2016 campaign, one the young crop of new progressive Democrats in Congress led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib has learned. Insofar as “pragmatism” is about efficacy, sometimes offering an uncompromising vision—one which inspires mass participation and grassroots movement energy—is the pragmatic approach. Likewise, in a populist moment, nothing is less pragmatic than an explicit appeal to pragmatism.

Of course, Sanders did none of this by himself. Left electoral strategists (and voters) were looking for a candidate to contest Hillary Clinton’s coronation, if only to push her to the left and introduce some progressive policy ideas to the public. Many of them hoped Elizabeth Warren would run. When Warren declined, the organizers of the “Draft Warren” campaign gravitated toward Sanders instead. These organizers employed a “distributed organizing” model which allowed local activists to participate semi-autonomously in building the Sanders campaign—through social media and in the streets—giving electoral work the feel (and effect) of a mass movement.

Meanwhile, it’s difficult to distinguish between the forces that Sanders generated and those that he effectively harnessed. As evidenced by the success of Donald Trump’s populist appeal—phony as it may be—and the rise of anti-elite sentiment worldwide, the settled neoliberal order is experiencing a global crisis of legitimacy.

Political scientists use the term “alignments” to describe discrete eras of hegemonic rule by one set of political forces and ideas. (“Hegemony”—an academic’s word that aspiring populists should avoid like the plague—simply means having sufficient power in society to define the dominant common sense.) Every alignment is upheld by a set of ideas which justify the domination of one constituency over others.

During the Reagan alignment (which others call “neoliberalism” or, in Britain, Thatcherism), politicians across the spectrum treated as common sense the idea that a “rising tide lifts all boats,” that GDP was the only relevant measure of social health, and that those unable to thrive in a global economy do so out of laziness or some other moral flaw.

Since he began his political career in the 1970s, Sanders has been offering a decidedly alternative vision, rooted in confronting concentrated economic power through grassroots activism. His anti-plutocratic ideas are resonating with Americans today—especially younger and more diverse Americans—because the era in which market fundamentalism and unfettered finance undergird the political consensus is finally over.

When the legitimating ideas of an existing political alignment stop making sense, it signals the end of that alignment. The legitimacy of the existing elite is imperiled—and there opens a possibility to articulate a new common sense.

Sanders was merely the first major politician on the Left to give voice to this progressive alternative when Americans were ready to hear it. Democrats who have already entered the 2020 primary are following his lead. Warren has proposed a 2 percent wealth tax on the “ultra-wealthy,” while Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has championed a financial transaction tax. Sen. Kamala Harris has endorsed Ocasio-Cortez’s call for a Green New Deal to combat climate change. This is realignment in action.

Despite what some pundits have said, Sanders’ entry into the presidential primary fray doesn’t auger a replay of the 2016 primary. The political ground has shifted beneath our feet. The contest between “pragmatic” supporters of Clinton and “idealistic” supporters of Sanders is over. The narrative never made sense in the first place. Whether or not Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic nomination in 2020, his vision has already redefined its horizons.

]]>Sam Adler-BellTue, 19 Feb 2019 15:34:00 +0000New York Isn’t the Only City Waging a Fight Against Amazonhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21731/amazon-hq2-sweepstakes-Nashville/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21731/amazon-hq2-sweepstakes-Nashville/After this story went to press in the March issue of In These Times, Amazon backed out of its commitment to locate one of its two “HQ2” headquarters in New York City, citing opposition from local lawmakers and residents. The story has been updated to reflect.

Nashville, Tenn.—County employee Richard Tippit approached the podium at a January Metro Council meeting. Behind him, workers from local public-sector unions held aloft a posterboard stamped “PAST DUE.” Tippit began, “We’re here tonight to deliver you an invoice for services performed by the employees of Nashville Metro government.”

He and his fellow workers had come to collect $38 million in promised cost-of-living increases for 9,300 public employees that the city had reneged on. “You paid every other bill—you even added more bills,” Tippit said, “but you didn’t pay one of the most important.”

“More bills” referred to a sore point: $15 million in subsidies that Amazon extracted from the city in November 2018 for a new logistics facility. Amazon had effectively jumped the line for public dollars ahead of Nashville’s city workers.

Amazon’s proposed 5,000-employee “Operations Center of Excellence,” which received an additional $87 million in state subsidies, was announced the same day as Amazon’s new “HQ2” headquarters in New York City and northern Virginia. Nashville had been one of 20 finalists for HQ2, the subject of an unusual public auction process.

Though eclipsed by the HQ2 announcement, the Nashville news signaled that Amazon’s secretive public auction, the HQ2 sweepstakes, is not over. Through voluminous data collection and skillful exploitation of short-term political dynamics, Amazon has turned the normally perfunctory process of choosing a new office location into a lesson in how to raid municipal treasuries. Now, it’s hitting up the HQ2 also-rans for more public dollars to build out its empire. Even though the company has said it will not seek to relocate the New York HQ2 facility after withdrawing its offer on February 14, it could still use the cancellation as bait by moving employees intended for HQ2 to other cities.

In 2018, as the HQ2 derby raged, Amazon quietly collected $58.1 million from cities that bid for HQ2. That doesn’t include the $102 million for the logistics center in Nashville or the roughly $1.8 billion promised for the headquarters in Virginia. All told, in 2018, Amazon raked in nearly $2 billion from these deals. Four of the 20 finalists—northern Virginia, Nashville, Boston and Raleigh, N. C.—have received, in exchange for subsidies, an Amazon facility in or around their cities. More cities can expect to receive consolation prizes like Nashville’s, if they pony up.

The HQ2 race was more than a PR stunt. “Amazon has a fantastic data set of what communities are willing to provide for the project, the process of obtaining these incentives, and risk associated with them,” says Nathan Jensen, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. “Amazon simply knows how high governments will jump.”

HQ2 kicked off in September 2017 as a cross between an expansion project and a reality game show. Amazon announced it would solicit bids across North America for a second headquarters, which would house 50,000 well-paid employees and contribute $5 billion in local investment.

It’s not like Amazon needed to pass the hat for a new office. Amazon is the world’s most highly valued company. It captures roughly half of all e-commerce sales and earned $56.6 billion in the third quarter of 2018. As more Americans use the internet for shopping, brick-and-mortar retailers have felt the pinch. Brands like Toys “R” Us, Gymboree, Brookstone and Nine West have gone bankrupt, and retailers like Sears, Ann Taylor and The Gap have shuttered hundreds of stores, leaving empty husks in malls across the nation.

Local governments, most of which are reliant on property taxes, have paid the price for this retail apocalypse. That hasn’t stopped cities from cozying up to Amazon, the destroyer of their tax base. In the United States, Canada and Mexico, 238 cities applied for HQ2.

A year and a half later, we still don’t know all their names. Amazon only released the number of bids, not where they came from. Practically everything the House of Bezos does is secret. “It’s clear that Amazon had a lot of requirements to keep things confidential,” says Paxtyn Merten, who worked for pro-transparency organization MuckRock on a project to collect every city’s HQ2 bid. At last count, MuckRock has only acquired 82 of the 238 bids, and many of those are redacted.

Some of the more outlandish offers—a 21-foot saguaro cactus gifted by Tucson, Ariz., and a proposed renaming of 345 acres of Stonecrest, Ga., as “Amazon, Georgia”—have been made public. But like WWE, this game was rigged.

The eventual winners of the HQ2 sweepstakes, New York City and northern Virginia, were almost certainly Bezos’ choices all along. Amazon already had large offices there, as New York and D.C. contain the tech-savvy workforces, transportation hubs, and educational facilities the company needs. CEO Jeff Bezos owns a home in New York and recently bought a giant mansion in D.C., along with the local newspaper. Amazon’s most aggressive pushes recently have been in entertainment (New York), advertising (New York), and government procurement (D.C.), including a lucrative cloud contract with the Pentagon (literally blocks from the new HQ location in Crystal City, Virginia).

In addition to PR, the ersatz competition served several purposes. It likely bid up the incentives from New York and Northern Virginia. Most important, it created a comprehensive database of North American city planning.

Amazon won’t just build headquarters over the next several years, but also logistics hubs, data farms, technology incubators, distribution centers and home offices for its spate of affiliated companies, from Audible to Twitch. Plus, it’s adding physical retail outlets nationwide. Thanks to HQ2, it knows available site locations for retail and commercial space in hundreds of cities, as well as what those cities are willing to fork over in subsidies.

All of that residential and consumer data is valuable to an e-sales company. “If I’m selling stuff, I now have information that my competitors do not have,” says Mark Funkhouser, the former mayor of Kansas City and current publisher of Governing magazine. “Where is the sales tax generated? The property tax? Where are the sewer lines?”

Some of the 20 finalists began receiving consolation prizes even before the HQ2 decision was announced. In May 2018, Amazon announced a regional headquarters for 2,000 machine learning and robotics employees in Boston. The company took home $30 million in incentives.

An HQ2 application from Raleigh that projected 63 percent population growth in the next 30 years may have got Amazon thinking. Last August, the city of Garner, a 32,000-resident commuter suburb of Raleigh, committed to a giant Amazon fulfillment center at a former ConAgra plant where a fatal explosion occurred in 2009. Amazon expects to provide 1,500 warehouse jobs at the site.

For its part, Garner is contributing $600,000, about 2 percent of its 2019 budget, to a $5.1 million project to improve a state road leading past the facility. “This is not a subsidy but an investment in public infrastructure,” says Joseph Stallings, economic development director for the city. North Carolina’s Department of Transportation will produce up to $4.5 million.

To fulfill its promises of two-day shipping, Amazon needs warehouse locations everywhere. So why did Garner have to pony up public money to rebuild a road for an Amazon warehouse?

Stallings implies that cities must offer subsidies to compete with other offers. “If everyone is playing with a corked bat and you’re not, you won’t get far.”

(The Nashville Yards complex was already under construction when Amazon agreed to rent space there— and collected $102 million in incentives for the privilege. Photo courtesy of David Dayen.)

It's hard to even take in all of Nashville Yards. It sits on 16 acres bisected by a freight rail line, a few blocks from a neon-lit tourist trap of live music stages and barbecue joints. The site plan includes a luxury hotel, a 4,500-seat theater, a movie multiplex, a condo tower, restaurants, green space and 1.5 million square feet of high-rise offices. In November 2018, months after construction began, Nashville learned it would include Amazon offices, too.

According to Metro Council member Bob Mendes, the office tower Amazon will occupy was already in site plans before the company got involved. Presumably, the Nashville Yards developers weren’t planning a large office tower to leave it empty; they would have found a renter. Yet Amazon managed to extract $102 million for the privilege. Of that amount, $80 million comes in the form of cash grants: $500 per job for seven years from Nashville, and a $65 million grant from the state for capital expenditures. Tennessee is also providing $21.7 million in credits to offset business taxes. And if the company relocates employees intended for the New York City headquarters to Nashville, the per-job cash grants the city and state have bestowed would grow.

Nashville had plenty to offer before the first dollar of incentives. Its downtown has experienced explosive business growth. Several colleges, led by Vanderbilt University, could serve as a talent pipeline. But not only does Amazon jump into a turnkey office without paying any construction fees; it gets a logistics center in the most strategic setting for logistics in the country.

Three major interstate highways and two rail yards converge in Nashville, and 75 percent of the U.S. population is reachable within a two-hour flight. Logistics is close to half the economy in this part of the Southeast, known as “Freight Alley.” Over a dozen large logistics businesses call Nashville home; FedEx’s headquarters is in Memphis; and UPS sits four hours down the road in Atlanta. And we know Amazon is building a shipping service to compete with FedEx and UPS.

Given all these attractions, were cash grants for Amazon necessary? “That’s the $15 million question,” says Mendes. He adds that the city grants were on the low side relative to other recent economic development deals in Nashville, and probably weren’t the decisive factor for Amazon. But if that’s the case, “Why did you have to give them the money?” asks Mark Naccarato of SEIU Local 205, which represents city workers.

Because the city of Nashville released its HQ2 pitch, we can see similarities in the operations center grant. Nashville Yards was offered as a potential HQ2 location. The grant’s offer of $500 per job for seven years echoes the HQ2 proposal of $500 a job for 15 years. Nashville also offered a property tax cut, but Amazon’s renting: They won’t be paying property tax.

The $87 million in state grants to Amazon are nearly six times what Nashville is kicking in. But we know less about them and their origins. The Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development decided to keep the state’s pitch for HQ2 secret for five years. Spokeswoman Jennifer McEachern told In These Times , “Publication of that material would hinder the state’s future ability to compete for economic development projects.” Such concealment renders impossible public scrutiny of what Tennessee asks of corporations in exchange for taxpayer dollars.

There's no guarantee the Amazon jobs will go to city residents rather than commuters or national recruits. Where those workers will live, and how they will get to the office, is an acute problem for a city struggling with affordabilityissues. Traffic snarls the Nashville area on a daily basis, and a recent referendum to expand mass transit failed. Housing costs have spiraled, with one-quarter of renters paying over half their income in rent.

Despite runaway business growth, Nashville finds itself in a budget crisis. In the most recent assessment in 2017, Nashville’s city government decided to keep property tax revenue constant, even though property values had soared and population jumped. This created the lowest property tax rate in the city’s history, something Nashville touted in its pitch to Amazon. But it also created a massive shortfall, as Nashville suddenly couldn’t afford pay increases for city workers or to fill a $40 million hole in the education budget. The city backed out of the promised raises.

The Amazon project will do little to help. The property tax revenue won’t come from Amazon, and the project is set in a development district where a portion of sales taxes is earmarked to pay down debt on a downtown convention center.

At Nashville’s January 15 Metro Council meeting, city employees spoke about the sting of seeing their city slip cash to Amazon while workers got shafted. “If the money for Amazon can be found, the money to pay those who are the backbone of the city should be just as easily identifiable,” said Theresa Wagner, a middle school teacher. “It’s time to make our children at least as valuable as billionaire investors.”

But the council opted to defer a vote on a nonbinding resolution to halt any corporate incentive payments until city employees receive their cost-of-living increase. Meanwhile, the council advanced a participation agreement for Nashville Yards, kicking in an additional $15 million for infrastructure improvements, over the objections of some council members who saw it as an effective doubling of Amazon’s incentives.

Despite these defeats, activists have gotten the attention of the council and broadened economic development conversations to whether projects benefit the entire community. “Before, the thinking was that all jobs are good jobs,” says Michael Callahan-Kapoor, an organizer with Stand Up Nashville, an SEIU Local 205-backed labor-community coalition that has been critical of the deal. “But that economic model doesn’t work.”

The resistance to Amazon’s post-HQ2 bounty, not only in Nashville but in New York and D.C., suggests that the sweepstakes may have backfired. Grassroots protests, contentious city council meetings and even high-profile opposition from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez led Amazon to cancel the New York facility. Amazon’s failure in New York offers a model to local organizers on how to limit or prevent corporate subsidies that don’t benefit the entire community.​

Amazon did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

(Protesters with New York Communities for Change demonstrate in Manhattan against the billion-dollar subsidy package for Amazon’s New York headquarters Nov. 26, 2018. Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

HQ2 alerted the public to the long-running economic development subsidy scam, which nets corporations some $45 billion to $90 billion a year from local governments. Nevertheless, Amazon will be reaping the benefits of the sweepstakes for years. In places like Nashville, those subsidies feel like a wealth transfer, with money pulled away from services for society’s most vulnerable and put into the hands of America’s biggest winners.

“To city leaders, economic development is justified because we will see returns on that investment,” says James Fraser. “But the people rewarded are not low-income people.”

Funkhouser, the former Kansas City mayor, thinks the only way to stop the bidding wars is to create a federal law prohibiting them. “It’s illegal for an American firm to accept a bribe in Brazil,” he says, referring to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. “But they can accept a bribe in the United States. They can accept $102 million. It is absolutely straight-up corrupt.”

]]>David DayenTue, 19 Feb 2019 13:31:00 +0000Good Riddance to Rahm Emanuelhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21720/rahm-emanuel-mayor-chicago-history/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21720/rahm-emanuel-mayor-chicago-history/Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, facing dismal approval ratings, announced in September 2018 he wouldn’t be running for a third term. Leading up to the next election, held February 26, even relatively moderate candidates have distanced themselves from Emanuel’s record on police violence, school closures and luxury development.

For progressives who have long been critical of Emanuel’s brand of business-friendly, pro-privatization policies, his fall was a sign that Third Way-style Democratic politics might finally be on their way out. In These Times has been reporting on Emanuel since he burst into the national spotlight in the 1990s working in the Clinton administration, through his stints as a representative in the U.S. House, as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff and as Chicago mayor.

Emanuel first appeared in our pages in the Feb. 8, 1998, issue, as a close advisor to Clinton. The president had set up a diverse advisory board on racial issues—then put five centrist white guys, including Emanuel, in charge of overseeing it. “I don’t know who they are or what they are doing,” one advisory board member told In These Times’ Salim Muwakkil. “I’ve never even met them.”

Emanuel popped up again three months later, in Doug Ireland’s review of Howard Kurtz’s classic book, Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine. Ireland refers to Emanuel as a “spin-meister” who spent his nights socializing with D.C. journalists and plotting how to crush negative stories about Bill Clinton.

David Sirota looked back on Emanuel’s role in the Clinton administration, and his subsequent private-sector career, in a 2007 story:

[Emanuel] provides a good example of dishonest graft. In 1993, Emanuel was the Clinton administration aide charged with ramming NAFTA through Congress ‘over the dead bodies’ of labor and environmental groups, as American Express’s CEO cheered at the time. Emanuel orchestrated weekly meetings with K Street lobbyists to strategize about how to pressure Democratic lawmakers. Emanuel went on to cash in as an investment banker, raking in roughly $16 million over a two-year period.

Following his time in private finance, in 2002 Emanuel was elected to represent Illinois in Congress. He was soon appointed head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), where he was accused of heavy-handed meddling in local races. “Everything [Emanuel and the DCCC] do drips with centralized arrogance and is as autocratic as any ensemble of Republicans,” Doug Cole, a DuPage County Democratic Party activist, toldIn These Times reporter David Moberg in 2006.

Cole wasn’t the only one to compare Emanuel to a Republican. That same year, the great writer and historian Studs Terkel called Emanuel the “Henry Kissinger of the Democratic Party” in an interview with In These Times columnist Laura S. Washington.

In 2008, newly elected President Barack Obama appointed Emanuel chief of staff, and he became a conservative force within the young administration. He projected an outward disdain for organized labor, exclaiming at one point during the 2010 auto bailout, “Fuck the UAW!”

In a 2009 In These Timescover story, Robert Dreyfuss discussed Emanuel’s hawkish influence on foreign affairs.

Emanuel, an unflinching partisan for Israel, is the son of a former fighter in the anti-British terrorist group, the Irgun Zvai Leumi. Emanuel’s father, who emigrated from Israel and now lives in a Chicago suburb, caused a stir when he commented on his son’s appointment. “Obviously he will influence the president to be pro-Israel,” he told a reporter. “Why wouldn’t he be? What is he, an Arab? He’s not going to clean the floors of the White House.” (Afterward, Emanuel was forced to apologize to an Arab-American organization for his father’s racist comments.)

In 2010, Emanuel moved across the country to run for Chicago mayor, where he was elected in 2011. Once there, as I wrote in a 2016 op-ed, Emanuel “earned his reputation as ‘Mayor 1%’ by shutting down public mental health clinics and public schools, giving massive tax breaks to corporations while black and brown neighborhoods remain mired in poverty, selling off public goods and services to private interests that prey on city taxpayers, laying off public sector workers, presiding over a scandal-plagued police department, and overseeing a historic number of shootings and gun deaths.”

For many, Emanuel’s time in Chicago will be most remembered for the 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike, in which teachers successfully fought back against the mayor’s demands for contract concessions. In covering the strike, Moberg compared Emanuel to yet another Republican, describing his “apparent bid to be the Democratic double for Scott Walker—the staunchly anti-union Republican governor of next-door Wisconsin.”

In a 2015 cover story, “How To Sell Off a City,” historian Rick Perlstein took a deep dive into Emanuel’s penchant for privatization as mayor, writing that he “has proven himself practically an addict when it comes to brokering deals with his former investment banker comrades and the other business interests he keeps on speed dial.” Perlstein documented those who benefited from Emanuel’s deals—from charter schools to investors to defense contractors—and those who footed the bills: the taxpayers, public transit riders, laid-off janitors and children with their schools closed.

As much as we’d like to be done writing about Emanuel, his political career may not yet be over. He claims to want to spend more time with his family, but he could still swoop in for a swan song. As our reporting over the years makes clear, he will not be welcomed back kindly by the public—or In These Times.

]]>Miles Kampf-LassinMon, 18 Feb 2019 19:10:00 +0000An Economic Blueprint for Chicago Any Progressive Candidate Should Get Behindhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21748/chicago_election_2019_rahm_emanuel_mayor_neoliberal_progressive/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21748/chicago_election_2019_rahm_emanuel_mayor_neoliberal_progressive/When Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley left City Hall in May 2011, he was greeted with banners reading, “Chicago … A World Class City … Thank You Mayor Daley.” Many mayors before him had set out to turn Chicago into a world-class city, and with those banners, the city’s political establishment was proudly proclaiming that Daley had accomplished this feat. When Rahm Emanuel succeeded Daley to the Mayor’s office, he saw it as his mission to maintain this world-class status.

But the vision of a world-class city that Daley and Emanuel have projected through their financial and budget priorities has been deeply incongruent with the needs of Chicago’s communities. Their version of turning Chicago into a “world-class city” typically meant passing policies to attract wealthy, white professionals and big, multinational corporations to the city—at the expense of the city’s communities of color. To these mayors, improving Chicago has included transforming the demographics of the city rather than improving the lives of the people who already live there. The policies embraced by both Daley and Emanuel have systematically pushed Black residents out of Chicago. Meanwhile, a wave of wealthier and whiter residents has ascended upon the city in recent years.

But Chicagoans don’t need elected officials who seek to replace them with people they find more desirable. They need new leaders who will break with the city’s past and reject policies that further enrich billionaires and major corporations. They need a new mayor and City Council that will help transform the city into one that meets the needs of the people who already call Chicago home.

Daley and Emanuel’s Neoliberal Paradise

In his quest to make Chicago “world-class,” Daley tore down public housing complexes—including Cabrini-Green—that had been home to thousands of poor Black families and turned the land over to developers to attract rich, well-educated white people into the city. The neighborhood where Cabrini-Green once stood saw the greatest increase in the concentration of households earning more than $200,000 of any neighborhood in the country between 2000 and 2017.

Daley also used Tax Increment Financing (TIF) schemes to siphon tax dollars away from blighted neighborhoods in order to award hundreds of millions of dollars in tax giveaways to rich corporations and developers. He invested in glitzy downtown projects like Millennium Park, greatly expanded bike lanes, opened new selective enrollment schools on the city’s predominantly white North Side and spent tens of millions on the city’s failed 2016 Olympic bid, all while consistently ignoring the needs of residents on the city’s predominantly Black and Latinx South and West Sides.

Emanuel followed in Daley’s footsteps. He invested in projects that would make Chicago more attractive to wealthier white families and tourists—like the Bloomingdale Trail, Maggie Daley Park and the Riverwalk extension—and turned a blind eye to the city’s Black and Latinx families who were enduring cuts to public services, endemic violence, and rapid gentrification and displacement.

As mayor, Emanuel continued to use TIF funds to take from the poor and give to the rich. He sought to bring both the G8 (unsuccessfully) and NATO summits (successfully) to the city in 2012 as part of maintaining Chicago’s world-class stature. He now wants to build an express train from downtown to O’Hare to make it easier for worldly business travelers to get to their meetings even though Chicago already has a public train line that makes that same trip. He was able to find $2.25 billion in tax handouts to offer to Amazon—the richest company in the world—but relies heavily on regressive fees from red light and speeding cameras in communities of color to fill budget deficits, despite the fact that unpaid traffic tickets are a major cause of bankruptcy for poor Chicago residents, and Black Chicagoans in particular.

Daley and Emanuel’s desire to rebuild Chicago as a haven for wealthy, white people is a symptom of a broader disease pervading Democratically-controlled cities throughout the country: Neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism, which looks to the market to solve social, economic and political problems, has been the prevailing ideology in the United States and much of the world over the past three decades. Neoliberals argue that if we let private sector actors compete in an unregulated marketplace, we will achieve better results than could be attained through government intervention or regulation. As a result, neoliberals generally favor cutting taxes, privatizing public services, deregulating industries and busting unions. In Chicago, this ideology has manifested through privatizing parking meters, tollways and airports, converting unionized public schools into nonunion, privately-run charter schools and overseeing a mayoral-appointed school board packed with corporate executives rather than one elected by voters.

When it comes to municipal politics in the United States, neoliberalism often boils down to decisions about who is worthy of public investment. In an economic system controlled by market competition, it’s presumed that the rich earned their money while the poor didn’t work hard enough, and therefore the rich should be rewarded and the poor should be punished. This helps explain why neoliberals like Daley and Emanuel hand massive tax giveaways to corporations while at the same time raising regressive fines and fees that hit poor people the hardest.

Not coincidentally, in big cities like Chicago, the unworthy poor are overwhelmingly people of color. Neoliberal ideology is undergirded by white supremacy. Neoliberalism’s reliance on competitive markets ensures that there will always be winners and losers. In America, however, the game is rigged to ensure that communities of color will always lose. The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and the role of white flight and racist redlining have ensured that Black people, in particular, remained poor and were not allowed to build wealth. While dressed in race-neutral language, neoliberal policies are often designed to punish people of color.

A Blueprint for Investing in Chicago’s Future

Neoliberal policies can never produce a truly world-class city, because the world does not need more cities that view the majority of their residents as people who need to be pushed out and replaced. As the Daley-Emanuel era in Chicago comes to a close, it’s important for the city’s newly elected leadership to learn from the failures of the past and commit to policies that will put the interests of Chicago’s current residents first. These policies must be rooted in one fundamental principle: Chicago should be governed for the people who live here.

This can only happen if the city’s elected officials reject the neoliberal paradigm that holds that public policies should reward the rich and punish the poor, and that anything government can do, corporations can do better. To give Chicagoans the world-class city they deserve, here is a menu of policies the city’s new elected leaders should embrace:

Make the wealthy and major corporations pay their fair share to fund quality public services. Chicago can raise more than $3.7 billion in progressive revenue by:

Levying a city income tax on high-earning residents and commuters

Imposing a speculation tax on the financial exchanges on LaSalle Street

Increasing the real estate transfer tax on high-end properties

Reinstating the corporate use fee for large corporations

Making the property tax system fairer

Ending tax handouts to major corporations and developers

That is more than enough money to pay for universal early childhood education, free community college for all, free public transit and a program to alleviate homelessness in Chicago that could reduce the number of homeless residents by 36,000 over ten years.

Target public investment in Black and Latinx communities to let them thrive. This means that:

The Black and Latinx neighborhoods that have historically been disinvested in and disenfranchised by City Hall must be the first ones to benefit from the expanded public services that new revenue streams can provide

City officials must divest from policing and incarceration, which currently accounts for nearly 40% of Chicago’s budget, and invest that money into programs that will actually help keep Black and Brown bodies safe

The new mayor and City Council should institute a vacancy tax on luxury apartment buildings to help keep rents down and fund affordable housing developments on Chicago’s South and West Sides to help keep Black and Latinx families in the city

Increase taxpayer investment in public services and keep them publicly-controlled. Instead of commodifying our public assets—like Chicago’s water, schools and transit systems—and selling them to private investors, we need to fully fund our public services and infrastructure and keep them public.

Establish a public bank and declare our independence from the big banks on Wall Street. A public bank could help Chicago and city agencies (like Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Transit Authority) save more than a billion dollars a year on financial fees and interest payments by:

Underwriting municipal bonds for the city and its agencies

Managing the city’s seven pension funds

Refinancing the city and its agencies’ debt at significantly lower interest rates

A world-class city is one that takes care of the people who already live there. Chicago’s new mayor and City Council should adopt this new blueprint for progressive economic policies to give Chicagoans the city they deserve.

These recommendations are taken from a report put out by the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE) that you can read in full here.

]]>Saqib BhattiSat, 16 Feb 2019 00:30:00 +0000Here Are the “Progressives” Who Watered Down the House Measure Ending Support for the Yemen Warhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21744/congressional_progressive_caucus_war_powers_resolution_hoyer_engel_yemen/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21744/congressional_progressive_caucus_war_powers_resolution_hoyer_engel_yemen/Wednesday’s overwhelming U.S. House vote (248-177) in favor of a War Powers resolution to end U.S. participation in the Saudi-led war on Yemen was no doubt a win for peace activists. But the victory was partially undercut by a little-noticed amendment introduced by Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.)—passed with support from 57 Democrats—that allows for continued U.S. intelligence sharing with Saudi Arabia.

Remarkably, 13 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), voted to support the amendment, a position to the right of the hawkish Democratic Reps. Eliot Engel (N.Y.) and Steny Hoyer (Md.). They are:

Katie Porter (Calif.)

Gil Cisneros (Calif.)

Maxine Waters (Calif.)

Angie Craig (Minn.)

Antonio Delgado (N.Y.)

Jared Golden (Maine)

Katie Hill (Calif.)

Steven Horsford (Nev.)

Andy Kim (N.J.)

David Loebsack (Iowa)

Joe Morelle (N.Y.)

Jimmy Panetta (Calif.)

Brad Sherman (Calif.)

Nine of these representatives are freshmen.

The Buck Amendment states that the President is able to share intelligence with any foreign country provided that “the President determines such sharing is appropriate and in the national security interests of the United States.”

According to Robert Naiman, policy director for Just Foreign Policy, which has been agitating to end the Yemen War, "The Buck Amendment could be interpreted by the Trump Administration as Congressional permission to continue sharing intelligence with the Saudi regime that the Saudi regime uses to carry out airstrikes against civilian targets in Yemen in areas under the control of Houthi forces. This could undermine the intent of the bill to protect Yemeni civilians from U.S.-assisted Saudi bombing, and undermine the Constitution's prohibition against U.S. participation in wars that have not been authorized by Congress."

On the House floor, Buck claimed that his amendment was needed because the sharing of intelligence has allowed Saudi Arabia to reducecivilian casualties. “I want to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to avoid the humanitarian crisis there, at the same time we recognize the geopolitical significance of our relationship with Saudi Arabia,” said Buck.

Yet, the United States has long been aware of civilian casualties in the war while continuing to support the offensive. According to a Reutersreport in 2016, under the Obama administration, State Department officials privately expressed concern that the U.S. government could be implicating itself in war crimes for its participation in the war. But this concern didn’t stop the Obama administration from refueling the military coalition’s bomber planes, helping identify targets and supplying arms.

Jehan Hakim, director of the Yemeni Alliance Committee, a group of Yemeni-American organizers that initially formed to oppose Trump’s Muslim ban, tells In These Times that Buck’s assertion is a lie. “The resolution with the Buck Amendment will continue to increase civilian casualties,” she says. “It's been almost four years that we have been supporting the Saudi led coalition and the rate of civilian casualties continues to rise. I think the American people deserve to know that the Saudi-led airstrikes that have been backed and supported by the United States have definitely increased civilian casualties.”

The 13 members of the CPC who voted in favor of the Buck Amendment did so despite the fact that the CPC whipped against it, and even Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), the House Intelligence Committee Chairman who has distinguished himself as a leading anti-Russia hawk, told Democratic offices he opposed the resolution. Peace campaigners say the CPC likely swayed these powerful Democrats—but not freshman who rode the “blue wave” to Congress.

“It's really disheartening to see that even with our new progressive Congress there was a majority vote in accepting that amendment," says Hakim. "It watered down the resolution’s intent to reduce harm on the ground.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) has been fighting for two years to pass the resolution, which “directs the President to remove U.S. Armed Forces from hostilities in or affecting Yemen within 30 days unless Congress authorizes a later withdrawal date, issues a declaration of war, or specifically authorizes the use of the Armed Forces.” The resolution, however, does not pertain to military actions supposedly used to combat al-Qaeda.

In addition to the Buck amendment, the resolution suffered a blow when another proposed change failed to even reach a vote. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) was expected to introduce an amendment that would have strengthened Khanna’s bill by clearly stating that the Trump administration must “remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities directed at Houthi forces in or affecting the Republic of Yemen.” Ultimately, the McGovern amendment never hit the floor over concerns that the modified version of the bill would have a more difficult time passing.

Less than two months after Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally killed by the Saudi government last October, the Senate voted to end military aid to the kingdom, pushing back against Trump's broad assertion of war powers. Khanna’s bill was blocked that same month by then-House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), who added a rider to the annual farm bill stripping Khanna’s bill of the War Powers Act status it needed to move forward.

The Trump administrationclaimed on November 9 that the United States has stopped assisting with mid-air refueling of bomber aircrafts—but has not provided sufficient public evidence to prove this is the case. Meanwhile, Trump claims the authority to reverse this decision at any time.

The U.S.-Saudi war began in 2015 after Houthi rebels drove out the U.S.-backed government of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), the death toll in Yemen has been severely understated. While some sources regularly report a number of 10,000 deaths, ACLED’s data suggests the number is somewhere between 56,000 and 80,000.

According to ACLED, the U.S.-backed Saudi-led coalition carried out 3,362 airstrikes in Yemen during 2018, and 420 of the bombings were carried out on residential areas. In August 2018, a coalition bomb was dropped on a school bus, killing 54 people, 44 of them children. A 2018 Save the Children report estimates that 85,000 children under the age of 5 have starved to death as a result of the war.

Khanna’s bill will now head back to the Senate to be voted on once again. Last week, the Trump administration threatened to block the resolution and the Senate vote might lead to the first veto of Trump’s presidency.

“We're calling this a win because it's a War Powers Resolution,” says Hakim. “Yes, it is watered down, but we're hoping the Senate will pass the original resolution without the amendment. We are going to continue to fight this until we are really withdrawing support.”

Marco Cartolano contributed research to this article.

]]>Sarah Lazare and Michael ArriaThu, 14 Feb 2019 19:38:00 +0000Texas Activists Thought They’d Kicked ICE Out of Their County. Then a Secret Deal Happened.http://inthesetimes.com/article/21745/texas-activists-thought-theyd-kicked-ice-out-of-their-county.-then-a-secret/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21745/texas-activists-thought-theyd-kicked-ice-out-of-their-county.-then-a-secret/Last June, activists in suburban Williamson County, Texas, had reason to celebrate. County commissioners had voted to terminate a contract with ICE for the privately-run T. Don Hutto Detention Center, a CoreCivic-run women’s facility for asylum seekers that has long been accused of rampant abuse. While there was no guarantee that the facility would close, it felt like county officials were finally listening to local residents and former detainees, and signaling an end to detention-for-profit practices in their community.

But Hutto remains open, thanks to a quiet agreement between ICE and CoreCivic. The county, and the city of Taylor where the detention center resides, have been indifferent while detainees continue to be locked up. And activists are appalled.

“We’ve been fighting for a long time, and we thought we were finally going to shut the place down after a decade,” says Bethany Carson, immigration policy researcher and organizer with the Austin-based organization Grassroots Leadership, which has led efforts to close Hutto. A planned rally on Thursday at the Taylor City Council presents the next stage in this seemingly endless battle.

The frustratingly hard-to-kill detention center represents a setback in the growing momentum of movements targeting private corporations that enable cruelty to immigrants. Earlier this year, Wells Fargo announced it would limit its lending to private prisons, which rely on the financial industry for cash flow. In February, the American Federation of Teachers union recommended to its pension funds to steer clear of private equity firms and asset managers who profit from mass incarceration. Pending legislation in California would force the state’s two large public pension funds, the Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), to divest from private prisons.

Williamson County is a fast-growing suburb of Austin with changing demographics; nearly one-quarter of residents are now Latinx. That shift drove activist fervor around closing the Hutto facility, a women-only detention center with around 500 beds.

In February 2018, Laura Monterrosa, a detainee at Hutto alleged sexual assault at the hands of a prison guard and was put into solitary confinement after speaking out. After she was released later last year, she became a powerful spokesperson for the need to close the facility. The fact that Hutto was holding women separated from their families and children after seeking asylum at the border, in addition to claims of sexual abuse and medical neglect, intensified the demands.

“Our organizing team started putting pressure on county commissioners, saying this is your contract,” says Bob Libal of Grassroots Leadership, which has advocated against mass incarceration and prison profiteering for decades. “What is happening at Hutto is in your hands.” After Grassroots Leadership began making weekly visits to county meetings, reading letters from detained women in the facility, commissioners decided that they didn’t want family separation on their conscience. They declared that the intergovernmental service agreement (ISGA) with ICE to let CoreCivic run the facility was not a core function of the county, and they said the contract would expire at the end of January.

Yet when the deadline rolled around, the facility did not close. ICE spokeswoman Nina Pruneda, told KXAN news in Austin that the agency “filed a short-term contract extension with CoreCivic for the T. Don Hutto Residential Facility located in Taylor, Texas, to remain open beyond Jan. 31, 2019.” Pruneda gave no end date for that extension.

According to Grassroots Leadership’s Bethany Carson, county commissioners didn’t know about the contract extension until they heard it from reporters. With a direct contract extension between ICE and CoreCivic, the county would have no oversight responsibilities to send in inspectors. “The county is totally out of it,” said Carson.

How ICE was able to shift from an ISGA with Williamson County to a private deal with CoreCivic is unclear. There is no record of any request for proposals or competitive bidding process, as is customary for federal contracts.

The city of Taylor appears reticent to intervene with its own oversight of the facility operating within its borders. “The city of Taylor is separate and apart from anything that CoreCivic and ICE have going on right now,” Mayor Brandt Rydell told KXAN. He added that he toured the facility in January and didn’t see any subpar conditions.

Grassroots Leadership has also uncovered through a public records request a security agreement for the Hutto facility between ICE and the Taylor Police Department, established as soon as the county cut ties in June 2018. The agreement commits the police department to providing emergency backup to on-site disturbances and assistance for apprehending any escapees. The public records request also unearthed a letter from Taylor chief of police Henry Fluck, thanking CoreCivic for their partnership at Hutto, and politely declining a gift card offered by a CoreCivic administrator.

This is not a situation where Taylor is a small town that’s wholly dependent on a detention center for its job base, Carson notes. “A lot of people from Austin are starting to move out, and there’s a thriving art scene,” she said. “The detention center threatens the potential for tourism and music, from our perspective. The city council is not viewing the detention center in that light.”

Grassroots Leadership remains in contact with detainees at Hutto, and believes abuses continue to take place there, though Taylor officials have denied this. “We hear things constantly,” Carson said. “All the systems in there set up to completely disregard [detainee] needs and make it difficult to get accountability when something bad happens.”
Grassroots Leadership has planned a “public demonstration of outrage” prior to Thursday’s Taylor City Council, demanding answers on why the facility remains open. The city of Taylor has not yet responded to a request for comment.

The rally is part of a nationwide flurry of direct action since the revelations about family separation at the border became widespread. Activists aim to peel off private-sector and local government partners from ICE, by raising awareness of the human rights concerns with family separation and immigrant detention.

For Valentine’s Day, the “Corporate Backers of Hate” campaign sent a mariachi band to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s house, playing love songs to urge him to “break up” with private prisons. JPMorgan is a leading financier for private prison companies CoreCivic and Geo Group.

Deconstructing facilities and arrangements for immigrant detention built up over years is a slow and often maddening process. The Trump administration continues to warehouse immigrants, driving demand for more beds. Activists’ strategy for disrupting that policy decision by going after the facilities is sound, but only if their pressure leads to action. Whether Grassroots Leadership can make it work in Taylor is a harbinger of whether immigration policy can truly be upended at the local level.

]]>David DayenThu, 14 Feb 2019 18:22:00 +0000Who Will Stand Up for Ilhan Omar?http://inthesetimes.com/article/21741/ilhan_omar_chelsea_clinton_donald_trump_aipac_israel_apartheid_democrats/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21741/ilhan_omar_chelsea_clinton_donald_trump_aipac_israel_apartheid_democrats/Over the weekend, Democratic Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar exposed a long-held open secret when she inferred that the financial influence of AIPAC, a top pro-Israel lobby group, is a significant player in lawmakers’ key policy decisions that support Israel’s interests.

Responding to journalist Glenn Greenwald’s about Republican leader Kevin McCarthy’s campaign to punish Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) for their criticisms of Israel, Omar wrote a couple of tweets underscoring the financial influence of AIPAC. “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby!” she wrote, referencing $100 bills and the title of a late-1990s hip-hop track by Puff Daddy.

Ilhan Omar was right to call out the massive influence of Israel lobby groups, which do not hide their close working relationships to U.S. lawmakers. Yet, she was immediately denounced, criticized and smeared as an anti-Semite, and not just by the usual coterie of right-wing, Israel-aligned politicians who already despise her anti-war positions and her bold support of the Palestinian cause. She was blasted by self-identified liberals as well—including Chelsea Clinton, the offspring of famous politicians who have been loyal supporters of AIPAC and Israel’s genocidal policies for decades.

The avalanche of condemnation peaked on Monday with chastising statements by top Democratic leaders Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), both staunch advocates of Israel’s policies. As the criticisms reached crescendo on Tuesday, President Donald Trump called for Omar to resign.

Republicans and Democrats alike are happy to throw Omar—a Black, Muslim refugee woman who has garnered significant popularity for her unapologetic progressive politics—under the bus.

However, by slamming the freshman representative, Pelosi, Schumer and the entire Democratic party revealed precisely what Omar pointed out: AIPAC, like other enormous lobby groups, wields its power by pushing politicians to protect their interests and silencing those who refuse to cower.

The politicians also allowed an actual anti-Semitic trope to proliferate: the conflation of legitimate criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish bigotry.

Israel advocacy organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League rushed to thank the Democrats for attacking Omar, once again smearing the congresswoman as an anti-Semite.

Tellingly, mainstream media outlets—including The New York Times and Politico—falsely reported that Omar referred to “Jewish money” in her criticism of AIPAC, when all she had done was point out the lobby group’s direct influence over U.S. politicians—influence about which AIPAC itself openly boasts.

A spokesperson for Israel’s foreign ministry joined the pile-on against Omar, accusing her of being part of a “rise” in “Left-wing anti-Semitism,” while McCarthy— who has peddled actual anti-Semitic conspiracy theories against George Soros and other prominent Jews—railed against Omar for “anti-Semitic tropes.”

McCarthy, like his colleagues on both sides of the aisle, pledging to protect “the Jewish people,” slid into a casual conflation between Jews and Israel, which is itself an act of anti-Semitism.

A powerful right-wing lobby

All lobbies on Capitol Hill work the same: They use millions of dollars and heavy political influence to sway and pressure U.S. lawmakers to draft legislation that push their political agendas.

AIPAC is explicitly an Israel lobby group, working on behalf of Israel’s interests to shore up support for its occupation and apartheid policies—policies that are becoming increasingly unpopular amidst the Democratic base and, significantly, amongst mainstream Jewish communal organizations.

AIPAC itself boasts of its influence on lawmakers to push Israel’s agenda. “The United States Congress has provided Israel with the strongest support of any institution in the world. Maintaining bipartisan congressional support for Israel is crucial,” the lobby group states.

AIPAC is not a Jewish advocacy organization. It is a far-right-wing Zionist organization which exists to promote Israel’s political interests and wield significant political influence inside the halls of power.

One of the most pernicious mechanisms of those who wish to defend Israel’s Zionist project has been to try to actively conflate Israel’s ideologies with Jewish identity in order to build a fortress around Israel’s practices of segregation, occupation, expulsion and discrimination against Palestinians and non-Jews in Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, and millions of Palestinian refugees in forced exile.

Such conflation of Jewish people with Israel’s interests is inherently anti-Semitic because it levels the Jewish people as a monolith—a flattened group in strict lock-step with an apartheid system built on violent theft of Palestinian land and decades of oppression.

Inadvertently, politicians’ smears against Omar, and those in corporate media headlines, became an ironic self-admission of this bigoted conflation: Their claims that Omar’s criticisms of AIPAC were somehow an attack on “Jewish money” is a blatant act of anti-Semitism at its worst.

The assumption that AIPAC’s interests are inherently Jewish interests is not only anti-Semitic in the fusion of Israeli policy with all Jewish people, but belies the fact that AIPAC is also supported, and defended, by both liberal and right-wing evangelical Christian policymakers pushing the U.S. government’s imperialist, pro-war agendas around the world.

We know how this charade works. If Israel’s policies are criticized, questioned or condemned by elected leaders, politicians line up to shield Israel and condemn the detractor as a bigot. If students, professors, activists and journalists speak out about Israel’s human rights violations, lawmakers fall all over themselves to write bills that punish such speech and those who say it.

These practices have not evolved in a vacuum: They are deliberate measures drafted by Israel lobby organizations, including AIPAC, and pushed by politicians eager to win re-elections at all costs. It is common knowledge on Capitol Hill that in order to win in Congress, lawmakers have to accept pressure from influential groups like AIPAC.

As activist Ady Barkan, a former Democratic congressional staffer, wrote in a Twitter thread on Monday, money from groups like AIPAC “is the lubricant that makes the whole machine run.”

“AIPAC is a central pillar of the occupation. Without Congressional support, the Likud/anti-Palestine/pro-occupation project would be radically undermined. AIPAC is the anchor of that support, and its money and [billionaire Republican donor] Sheldon Adelson’s money are indispensable to the work,” Barkan added.

AIPAC itself boasts of its ability to pressure lawmakers to conform to its political agenda, as has been documented in hidden camera footage acquired by Al Jazeera in its censored documentary, “The Israel Lobby - USA.”

Silencing critics

This is why politicians on both sides of the aisle have either condemned Omar’s remarks or failed to come to her defense: The pressure on U.S. lawmakers by Israel lobby groups is precisely designed to silence Israel's critics, using the threat of being labeled with anti-Semitism as a cudgel to break any defection from the status quo on Israel.

But support for Israel on Capitol Hill should not be distilled down only to financial or otherwise thuggish interactions between lobby group A and lawmaker B. Rather, this relationship aligns with the U.S. government’s standard policy of maintaining Israel as a highly-weaponized, authoritarian rampart for Western imperialist interests in the Middle East.

It’s no coincidence that some of Israel’s boldest supporters in Congress are also some of the most pro-war actors to hold office today, including Pelosi and Schumer, who never met an overseas aggression they didn’t like.

Of course, Ilhan Omar is no anti-Semite, nor were her comments on AIPAC anti-Semitic. And of course, the U.S. lawmakers and pundits know it.

But accusing her of anti-Semitism is meant as a way to restrain her criticisms of Israeli policies and, more importantly, to make it clear to other leftist members of Congress to not bother opening their mouths about Israel, let alone the other projects of occupations, wars and interventions that benefit Israel and the United States.

It is also telling that, so far, not one other elected representative has robustly supported Omar's right to critique AIPAC, including woke progressive darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Clearly, AIPAC’s pressure, and the bullying by top Democratic leadership in service to AIPAC and other Israel lobby groups, is, as it itself claims, a major force in Washington. Otherwise, Omar’s criticisms of it would not have elicited such spectacular fury.

And she wouldn’t have been made to apologize, which she did on Monday evening.

The attacks on Omar won’t stop, however, no matter how many times she is forced to make concessions. Israel’s lobby groups—and their political beneficiaries—will continue to use her honesty about the mechanisms of political influence in service to war and authoritarianism as a weapon if she is left to fend for herself.

Omar’s colleagues in Congress know that the winds are shifting away from unchecked support for Israel and its violent systems of apartheid and expulsion of Palestinians. They should come to her defense and join her in calling out Israel’s political influence loud and clear.

McDonald died in October 2014, just after the high-profile police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in Staten Island, and became a flashpoint in the growing Movement for Black Lives. When the Chicago video was finally released in November 2015, the city’s activist community, led by black youth, took to the streets in mass protests. McDonald’s murder became a referendum on Chicago’s political leadership.

Emanuel attempted to appease the protesters by firing McCarthy in December 2015, calling him “a distraction.” In response, the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100)—a group that had been on the forefront of the protests—released a statement calling for Alvarez, Emanuel and “all top elected officials involved in the coverup” to “resign immediately.”

Ahead of the March 2016 primary election, youth-led racial justice groups, including BYP100 and Assata’s Daughters, worked to defeat Alvarez through a campaign called #ByeAnita. The organizers of #ByeAnita declined to endorse Foxx, or any state’s attorney, on the grounds that the role of a prosecutor is inherently harmful, but instead “sought to inspire people to feel their power to take down giants” by targeting Alvarez, as Page May of Assata’s Daughters put it in an op-ed for Truthout. Organizers conducted banner drops across the city, interrupted Alvarez campaign events and talked to community members about the importance of showing the embattled prosecutor the door. Meanwhile, social justice organizations People’s Action and Grassroots Collaborative made hundreds of thousands of calls and house visits on behalf of Foxx.

Alvarez was walloped, receiving only 29 percent of the vote. Only Emanuel was left. In September 2018, facing an uphill re-election battle partly because of the McDonald scandal, Emanuel announced he would not seek a third term.

That victory put wind in the sails of a larger political upheaval already underway in Chicago. Ahead of the city’s February 2019 aldermanic elections, a pack of left challengers with organizing backgrounds are putting movement demands front and center. Mayoral candidates are also responding to these demands—and running left of Emanuel.

“The number one reason we have this electoral moment is absolutely the organizing of young black people in the city fighting in response to massive police brutality,” says Amisha Patel, executive director of Grassroots Collaborative. “That created an opening for other campaigns.”

Chicago is also benefiting from a national climate of impatience with corporate Democrats and an appetite for new blood. Since Bernie Sanders first called for a “political revolution” during his 2016 presidential run, thousands of progressives across the country have heeded the call by running for office themselves, from local school council to the U.S. House. Despite victories around the country, these insurgents can often be lone voices among their colleagues, and no sizable bloc of left challengers has since upended the political establishment of any major U.S. city.

But in 2019, Chicago—a city notorious for its Democratic machine—may make history by delivering just such an upheaval of the old guard by movement-backed candidates hungry for change.

“What we are seeing in Chicago is unique—an entire slate of movement candidates mounting credible challenges to establishment politics,” says George Goehl, director of People’s Action. “If successful, the makeup of the Chicago City Council will be unlike anything in a generation.”

From the Machine to Pinstripe Patronage

Chicago is infamous for its 150-year-old machine, known for most of the 20th century as a vast political patronage network of fraud, bribery and outright violence. The machine has proven adept at co-opting its opposition—even long-term Mayor Richard J. Daley, nicknamed “the Boss,” originally ran as an anti-machine reformer.

A series of federal court orders in the 1970s and 1980s reined in the patronage system that provided city employment to those who “delivered” votes to the party, but critics saw a new system evolve to take its place. Corruption under the first Mayor Daley relied on the unpaid labor of blue-collar city workers; under his son, Mayor Richard M. Daley, unaccountable power was amassed by corporations, contractors and LaSalle Street lawyers through campaign contributions—what In These Times reporter David Moberg labeled “pinstripe patronage.”

The most recent bright spot for progressivism in City Hall was the 1983 victory of Mayor Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, who narrowly defeated the machine with a coalition that brought together radicals, newly enfranchised black voters, white “lakefront liberals” and growing Puerto Rican and Mexican populations.

Washington died in office a year into his second term. Ever since, Chicago’s Democratic machine has thrived by mastering the dark arts of pinstripe patronage through innovations like tax increment financing programs (TIFs) and the privatization of city services and infrastructure, and via disinvestment that drains the political power of communities of color.

When Richard M. Daley stepped down after 20 years in 2011, Rahm Emanuel seized the chance to make a graceful exit from the Obama administration—where his centrist politics and
bullying tactics were making him persona non grata—and ride Obama’s coattails to victory in the Chicago mayoral race. With close ties to Wall Street, Emanuel took pinstripe patronage to a new level, courting finance capital and pouring money into a glitzy downtown, while disdaining the needs of the city’s working class, especially the sorely underserved black and brown neighborhoods.

Emanuel’s first budget laid off public workers such as police and fire dispatchers, cut social services for domestic violence victims and the elderly, and increased fines and fees for everything from parking to vehicle stickers to water service. Public libraries were forced to reduce hours, and, infamously, half of Chicago’s public mental health clinics were closed.

The Mental Health Movement, a grassroots group, formed to protest the closures—including by occupying clinics. Activist N’Dana Carter summed up her views to Emanuel biographer Kari Lydersen this way: “Emanuel is an enemy of people of color.”

Like Daley before him, Emanuel continued to privatize city services, such as school custodial services and public transit fare cards. Emanuel increased property taxes and fees on services such as garbage pickup and water delivery, all of which hit low-income residents the hardest, earning him the nickname “Mayor 1%.” Meanwhile, the spread of high-end developments—private ventures often subsidized by TIFs—led to mass displacement of poor communities of color.

“Chicago is one of the last major cities that you could possibly call working class,” says the Grassroots Collaborative’s Patel. “And that label is certainly disintegrating quickly as prices are escalating across neighborhoods, from Woodlawn to Logan Square.”

For all their deficiencies, both Daleys were connected, if unevenly, to community organizations in all 50 wards. But when the Chicago Reader’s Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke won access to Emanuel’s private schedule through a Freedom of Information Act request, Chicagoans learned the mayor met with community representatives almost never—but with wealthy businessmen all the time.

Mayor 1% would soon face mass unrest. The first public outpouring came in 2012, when the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), under the new leadership of Karen Lewis of the militant Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, rebelled against concessions Emanuel was demanding in their next contract. Teachers went on strike for the first time in Chicago in 25 years.

Following seven raucous days on the picket lines, the union reached an agreement that was widely seen as a massive defeat for Emanuel. The victory would serve as a model for rising teacher militance nationwide, inspiring strikes from West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona’s “red state revolt” of 2018 to the successful 6-day walkout by Los Angeles teachers in January.

In 2013, with the backing of his appointed Board of Education, Emanuel defied the teachers again by announcing the closure of 50 public schools, most of which were in impoverished black and brown neighborhoods, while continuing to expand nonunion charter schools. Despite widespread protests, Emanuel carried through with the plan.

In 2015, the CTU recruited Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a longtime Chicago politician who had served in the Harold Washington administration, to challenge Emanuel. Garcia forced a mayoral runoff election—the first against an incumbent in Chicago’s history—but Emanuel, with the help of a bulging campaign war chest, came out on top.

But the backlash over the school closures and the suppression of the McDonald video eventually caught up with the mayor. By spring 2018, Emanuel was polling at 36 percent favorability and losing by wide margins in head-to-head polls against potential challengers, causing pundits to declare the mayor “unelectable.”

When Emanuel finally bowed out, he left a political vacuum in his wake. Fourteen mayoral hopefuls are competing in the February election to take his place. Many of the top contenders, such as Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, former Police Board President Lori Lightfoot, and community organizer Amara Enyia, are running on movement demands such as reopening mental health clinics, investing in schools and reining in the police. The CTU has endorsed Preckwinkle, a former history teacher who signed onto many of the union’s priorities, including an elected (rather than mayor-appointed) school board and a moratorium on school closings, charter-school expansion and school privatization.

Other contenders, such as former Obama Chief of Staff Bill Daley (another son of Richard J. Daley), businessman Willie Wilson, and former public school heads Paul Vallas and Gery Chico, are running on more moderate platforms, though their campaigns also reflect the shifting political terrain as they refuse to support aspects of Emanuel’s agenda, such as further school closings or increasing regressive fees and fines.

Even State Comptroller Susana Mendoza, slammed by critics as running for “Emanuel’s third term,” has taken positions to the left of Emanuel on education and immigration, advocating a “hybrid” semi-elected school board and expanding Chicago’s sanctuary city ordinance—though not as fully as activists would like.

Chicago’s next mayor is likely to face a city council very different from the “rubber stamp” backing Emanuel had. Dick Simpson, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and a former alderman, explains that, in most election cycles, very few viable progressive City Council challengers run.

This year, he estimates, at least 10 stand a real chance of winning. The victors would join the 11-member progressive bloc already on the 50-member Council, where, Simpson says, they will have “a wide-open opportunity to chart the future of the city.”

“It’s really new for Chicago to have aldermen in the majority of wards run on something that looks like working-class policy and policy aimed at dealing with the racism that Chicagoans are experiencing,” says CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates, who calls the 2019 election “the most consequential since Harold Washington.”

Reigning In the Police

A number of aldermanic candidates are campaigning on support for a Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC), which would establish an elected civilian body to oversee
the CPD, tasked with the hiring and firing of the police superintendent and disciplining officers.

In October 2013, the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression—founded in 1973—released draft legislation to create CPAC. While the CPAC bill languished in City Council, opposed by Emanuel and his allies, the Black Lives Matter movement led a renewed effort to combat police violence.

Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, elected in 2015 on a progressive platform that included CPAC, re-introduced the bill in July 2016, but it was buried in committee. After a jury found Jason Van Dyke, the police officer who killed Laquan McDonald, guilty of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery, Ramirez-Rosa reintroduced CPAC again in October 2018. Its prospects may lie in how many police-accountability candidates win aldermanic office in February.

Among those campaigning on CPAC is Maria Hadden, 38, who, if elected, would become the first openly gay black woman on City Council. Hadden, who has worked around participatory budgeting efforts for a decade and serves on BYP100’s board, is running against 28-year incumbent and Emanuel ally Ald. Joe Moore in the 49th Ward. Nestled along Lake Michigan on the far North Side, the ward includes the diverse neighborhood of Rogers Park and is home to a vibrant progressive community.

“Our government agencies and departments can’t be effective if people don’t trust them,” says Hadden, commenting on the need for CPAC. Another candidate supporting CPAC is Rafael Yañez, running in the South Side’s 15th Ward against incumbent Raymond Lopez, another Emanuel ally. Yañez, a former police officer, says his experience on the force taught him that CPD requires wide-ranging reform. “We can have a more humane approach, and we owe it to the future of our kids,” Yañez recently told Block Club Chicago.

Yañez is also opposing the construction of a massive $95 million police academy in the West Side neighborhood of West Garfield Park. Emanuel and his allies, including Lopez, say the new facility is necessary to meet the demands of a 2017 Department of Justice investigation that found rampant abuse within the CPD. But opponents of the project, such as Assata’s Daughters, BYP100 and the People’s Response Team, campaigning under the banner of “No Cop Academy,” say the funds should instead be invested in jobs, education and afterschool programming. The No Cop Academy coalition argues that a “scathing critique of Chicago Police Department violence should not be used to justify funneling more resources into a proven violent institution.”

Lopez’s support for the academy has made him the target of a “Fuera Lopez!” (Lopez Out!) campaign inspired by #ByeAnita.

Another opponent of the academy is Tara Stamps, a longtime CPS teacher and community organizer running in the 37th Ward, which includes the site of the proposed project. Stamps’ opponent, incumbent Emma Mitts, has been a high-profile supporter of the construction. Mitts claims the project “will reduce crime and increase public safety,” but Stamps echoes movement organizers, saying in a campaign video, “Adding police alone is not the solution.”

Page May, of Assata’s Daughters, says she can hear the impact of activism even in the candidates’ use of the phrase “No Cop Academy”: “That’s not the name of the facility; that’s our talking point.”

She adds, “They’re also emphasizing the points we’re trying to make about what is needed to get at some of the root causes of the violence and the problems in our communities—the demand for a living wage, the demand for the reopening of the mental healthcare facilities, the demand for quality schools.”

Real Sanctuary

Six days after Donald Trump was elected president, Emanuel organized a press conference to reassure immigrants in Chicago that they should feel safe, pointing to a Welcoming City ordinance that helps protect undocumented residents from being targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Luis Gomez, one of the undocumented speakers at the event, was not buying it. Standing next to Emanuel, he told the mayor, “You need to stop categorizing and separating the undocumented community. … I demand that you stand for all immigrants.”

Gomez was referring in part to carve-outs in the Welcoming City ordinance for people deemed criminals by the city. The carve-outs make Chicago’s sanctuary city status far weaker than that of its peers, like New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. If immigrants have criminal records or appear in the city’s gang database—a list that critics describe as arbitrary—Chicago police can
turn suspects over to ICE for deportation. Immigrant justice groups Organized Communities Against Deportations and the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) have joined with BYP100 to demand that candidates support strengthening the sanctuary city ordinance and ending the gang database.

One of the aldermanic challengers supporting these proposals is Byron Sigcho-Lopez, running in the 25th Ward, which includes the heavily immigrant South Side neighborhoods of Pilsen and Chinatown. Sigcho-Lopez, born in Ecuador, serves as executive director of the Pilsen Alliance, a grassroots group that organizes for affordable housing, fully funded public education and immigrant protections.

“This isn’t just an issue of justice for undocumented people, it is also an issue of public safety,” says Sigcho-Lopez, who also supports CPAC. “Undocumented people are often unwilling to seek recourse from law enforcement even upon witnessing a crime for fear of retribution, from ICE or otherwise.”

Ramirez-Rosa, whose district includes a large Latinx community, has also made enshrining immigrant protections and ending the carve-outs a major issue in his re-election campaign. His office has held a number of immigrant defense trainings, working with groups such as ICIRR. In 2017 he introduced a bill (with 26 co-sponsors) to remove the carve-outs but says Emanuel maneuvered to keep it from a vote.

Teaching Democracy

Walter H. Dyett High School sits at the edge of sprawling Washington Park on Chicago’s South Side. The public school is lauded as an arts and technology incubator but only exists thanks to community struggle.

In August 2015, a dozen parents and school activists began a hunger strike to save Dyett from closing. Initially ignored by the school district, the 34-day hunger strike led to the reopening of Dyett for the 2016-17 school year with 10 times as many students.

One of those strikers was Jeanette Taylor, a community activist who is now running for alderman in the 20th Ward’s crowded field. Previously, Taylor was part of a successful effort to bring a trauma center to the South Side to treat victims of gun violence. She was first encouraged to run by People United for Action, an affiliate of United Working Families (UWF), a grassroots coalition led by the CTU and SEIU Healthcare Illinois & Indiana.

If elected, Taylor plans to prioritize what has become a unifying policy position among progressive challengers—the creation of an elected school board. “The appointed school board makes decisions based on who they’re connected to,” says Taylor. “They have no accountability to the public.” Taylor, like many candidates, also calls for ending both school closings and charter school expansion.

Erika Wozniak is a CPS fifth-grade teacher running in the 46th Ward against two-term incumbent and friend of Emanuel, James Cappleman. One of the 50 schools Emanuel closed in 2013 was Graeme Stewart Elementary in the Uptown neighborhood on the North Side. After the closure, Cappleman helped broker a deal to turn the shuttered school into luxury apartments. Wozniak responded on Twitter, “I’m disgusted.”

“We need a council that is going to advocate for fully funded, well-resourced neighborhood public schools,” Wozniak says.

Housing For All

When Rossana Rodríguez was pregnant with her now 4-year-old son Marcel in 2014, she and her partner were priced out of their Albany Park apartment after the landlord increased the rent by $200 a month. A few months later, Rodríguez was forced out of another apartment after her new landlord sold the building. That time, she had to move with a newborn.

Rodríguez says she has seen her neighbors in the 33rd Ward systematically pushed out by rising rents over the nine years she’s lived there. Rodríguez, a Puerto Rican native and longtime educator, joined the Lift the Ban coalition—a group of over 20 organizations working to lift Illinois’ ban on rent control. The coalition’s ultimate goal is to ease the impact of housing costs and keep people in their homes. According to a study by National Equity Atlas, 51 percent of households in Chicago are “cost burdened,” meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Meanwhile, the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless released a survey in May 2018 showing that the city is home to over 80,000 homeless residents, including nearly 18,000 homeless public school students.

“We need to move away from the idea that housing needs to be driven by profit,” says Rodríguez, who decided run through her work with 33rd Ward Working Families, another affiliate of UWF. “Housing is a basic need and it can’t be left to the forces of the free market.”

Rodríguez, who has refused to take donations from developers, is taking on Ald. Deb Mell. Mell replaced her father, Richard Mell, when he retired from City Council in 2013. Over 38 years as an alderman, Richard benefited from donations from the real estate industry, which he joined as a lobbyist after leaving office. Deb has also received campaign contributions from major developers, including Silver Properties, a group protested by the Autonomous Tenants Union (a housing justice group Rodríguez has worked closely with) for evicting longtime Albany Park residents.

In the 1st Ward, which includes sections of Logan Square and gentrifying Wicker Park, Daniel La Spata is taking on Ald. Proco “Joe” Moreno who, according to an analysis by Reclaim Fair Elections, receives the highest percentage of campaign funding from property
management companies of any alderman. La Spata has worked with the Logan Square Neighborhood Association for 13 years and says that protecting residents from displacement is a critical task. “The fight for housing is inextricably linked to the displacement of families, the under-enrollment of local schools and the deepening segregation of our communities,” La Spata says.

Vivien Tsou, a housing organizer with the grassroots group ONE Northside, sees this election as elevating the demands that she and her fellow organizers have spent years fighting for. “The fact that politicians feel that they need to show that they’re good on housing means that housing is definitely one of the big electoral issues this year,” Tsou says. “That has been exciting to see.”

The Edge of a New Wave

Chicago’s newly elected council members will still have to deal with the remnants of the Chicago machine. A number of the aldermen from the Richard M. Daley administration still hold their seats. With the exception of a few progressive members, Chicago aldermen tend to be risk averse, more inclined to curry favors for their wards by falling in line with the mayor than to advance bold progressive proposals.

But the machine is taking blows. In January, news broke that 50-year incumbent Ald. Ed Burke of the 14th Ward is under investigation by the FBI. Many mayoral candidates and sitting aldermen are tainted by association with Burke, a longtime Daley ally. Twenty-three-year incumbent Danny Solis of the 25th Ward is reportedly also under investigation, which led him to secretly wear a wire to record Burke. Solis has announced his retirement while Burke is running in what’s being called his stiffest re-election race yet, another sign of upheaval.

Even with some machine Democrats out, the powerful interests they answered to will remain. Demands for police accountability will be opposed by the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)—the powerful union representing CPD officers. Perhaps the most daunting obstacle will be the dominant role of finance capital in Chicago government. Chicago’s finance markets, the Chicago
Mercantile Exchange and the Board of Trade, are run by the CME Group, a global financial power that holds enormous sway over Chicago’s financial decisions. By threatening to move jobs and business out of the city, the CME Group, a major Emanuel donor, has been able
to secure significant tax breaks, starving the city of financial resources.

This lopsided relationship is unlikely to end with a new mayor. “The corporate establishment, including the global financial businesses, will still have a big voice in determining the policies of the city going forward,” predicts UIC’s Simpson. Wealthy campaign contributors such as Michael Sacks, vice chair of World Business Chicago and a major Emanuel donor, will continue to steer the city’s political leadership away from regulations or new taxes on the super-rich.

Emanuel has also left the city in debt. With Chicago mired in a deep pension crisis, he borrowed extensively, putting creditors first in line for new city revenue. Funding for policies that benefit residents will be stalled unless the city overturns these arrangements—a move that a number of left aldermanic challengers support.

Mirroring national progressive leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her proposed 70 percent top marginal tax rate, movement candidates in Chicago also embrace policies to raise revenue from corporations and the super-rich. Ideas like a financial transaction tax (known locally as a LaSalle Street tax), a corporate head tax and reforming the city’s TIF program have been floated by grassroots groups for years but were never taken seriously by the city’s political elite. Now these ideas are being championed by an array of aldermanic challengers. Rodríguez, Sigcho-Lopez and Taylor have all made taxing the rich a centerpiece of their platforms. “One penny of the LaSalle Street tax on every transaction will put more money in our communities,” says Taylor.

The threat of Trump’s reactionary agenda has also motivated challengers. The Grassroots Collaborative’s Patel puts it this way: “A big factor in 2019 is that there’s pressure to come out in a place like Chicago in the context of a Trump presidency to say, ‘Look, we want to be on the offense. We want a bold, transformative agenda, in particular because of what’s happening at the federal level.’”

Rodríguez sees a connection between bold local and national policies. “At a city level, we are talking about rent control, we are talking about No Cop Academy, we are talking about police accountability, we are talking about sanctuary for all. At a national level, we are talking about Medicare for All and taxing the rich. People are reimagining what is possible.”

Many of these aldermanic candidates are linked by both their movement organizing and their endorsements from citywide progressive organizations. UWF has endorsed Hadden, Stamps, Wozniak, Rodríguez, Taylor, Yañez and Ramirez-Rosa. The CTU has endorsed all of those candidates along with Sigcho-Lopez. Reclaim Chicago, a local arm of People’s Action, backs Ramirez-Rosa, Rodríguez and Hadden. La Spata has the support of Grassroots Illinois Action, the sister organization of Grassroots Collaborative.

A new player in the electoral arena this year is the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which has endorsed Rodríguez, Ramirez-Rosa, Sigcho-Lopez and Taylor, along with Ugo Okere, a challenger running against 35-year incumbent Pat O’Conner in the 40th Ward. Other than Taylor, the group’s endorsees are all card-carrying DSA members.

In contrast to the typical electoral model of most advocacy PACs and unions—i.e., making calculated endorsements based on a candidate’s viability in exchange for future influence—the left electoral infrastructure of United Working Families, Reclaim Chicago, Grassroots Illinois Action and DSA is different. These organizing and community groups are recruiting candidates from their own ranks, who seek office to carry out movement work. “This job to me is nothing but a community organizer with money,” says Taylor. “You organize around what your community wants to see.”

Electing a bloc of these movement candidates to office would give newfound leverage to communities typically locked out of the halls of power.

The CTU’s Davis Gates sees even longer-term change afoot: “If I’m looking in a crystal ball, 2023 will actually be even more transformative because of the momentum that we’ll be gaining from both the challenges and the victories we see.”

]]>Miles Kampf-LassinTue, 12 Feb 2019 18:11:00 +0000What the Yellow Vests Have in Common with Occupyhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21729/yellow-vests-occupy-movement-paris-france-protests/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21729/yellow-vests-occupy-movement-paris-france-protests/PARIS—In Belleville Park, a small, steep public garden with panoramic views of the city, about 40 supporters of the gilets jaunes (Yellow Vest) movement have gathered on a chilly January night for what’s billed as a “neighborhood popular assembly.” It’s the third such meet-up to discuss what residents of this historically working-class quarter can do to support the wave of demonstrations.

It’s a wide-open question, much like the future of the Yellow Vest revolt. Online anger over a planned doubling of the fuel tax, to about 25 cents a gallon, spilled into the streets in November 2018. The movement took its symbol from the clothing item required of French motorists since 2008. Rooted in rural areas and outer suburbs, the demonstrations quickly spread, thanks in no small part to social media. They soon came to represent deeper frustrations with the rising cost of living. Far from anti-environmental, the movement simply called on the wealthy to pick up the tab for France’s transition away from fossil fuels.

After weeks of traffic blockades, disruptive marches and occasionally violent clashes with the police, in December 2018 the Yellow Vests won a series of concessions from President Emmanuel Macron: the cancellation of the fuel tax increase, the scrapping of a separate tax hike on pensions passed the previous year, and the expansion of a state subsidy for low-wage workers that could amount to a monthly pay bump of roughly $115. Nevertheless, the protests persist.

“I want to keep pissing off the politicians,” Jean Robert, a 71-year-old retiree, tells the group assembled in Belleville Park. “Whatever we can do to keep putting pressure on them.”

The Yellow Vest movement is remarkably grassroots, organized independently of political parties and unions, and varying substantially by location. Protesters’ calls to tax the rich and to raise wages have earned support from the French Left.

But the Yellow Vests have also won sympathy from the country’s far right. The ever-calculating Marine Le Pen of the newly renamed National Rally party (formerly the National Front) has paid it lip service, and a small share of demonstrators appear to share her warped diagnosis of French society’s ills—calling, for instance, on France to exit the United Nations’ Global Compact for Migration, which they see as a Trojan horse for mass immigration from Africa and the Middle East.

All that seems far removed from this meeting, though, whose participants are a snapshot of Belleville itself, long inhabited by immigrants and their descendants, especially from North Africa. Attendees are young and old, white and brown, leading a freewheeling two-hour discussion reminiscent of the Occupy movement. It’s both exciting and messy: Someone suggests blocking a major food and produce market; another says the movement should focus on economic issues; someone else says residents should focus on housing speculation and spray graffiti on the offices of real estate agencies. Another speaker tells everyone how much fun he had demonstrating in the city’s wealthy neighborhoods.

Yann Le Bihan, a 48-year-old school administrator, takes the floor and mentions a modest decline in public support. While a YouGov study from late November 2018 found 70 percent of the country backed the Yellow Vests, a more recent version of the poll showed 62 percent approval.

“The most important thing you can do is talk to your friends and acquaintances when you hear misinformation about the Yellow Vests,” says Le Bihan. “But we also need to work ourselves on our communication, on our talking points.”

Not everyone agrees. “This is much bigger than talking points or public relations,” Amparo, a 62-year-old schoolteacher who declines to give her last name, says to applause. “We’re in the fight of our lives! … Opinion polls go up and down, the stock market goes up and down, but so what? We’re fighting for our lives.”

Revolutionary ambitions notwithstanding, several pressing issues loom over the movement today. First, there’s the question of the Citizens’ Referendum Initiative, known as the RIC. The most prominent version of the proposal would allow French citizens to introduce and authorize legislation, to nullify laws, to revoke legislators and to amend the constitution—all by referendum. Some Yellow Vests consider it the movement’s single most important demand, though others seem more suspicious. “It’s a super-revolutionary proposal,” bellowed one enthusiastic activist at the Belleville meeting—though he was the only one to mention it.

Then, there is the so-called great national debate. Instead of taking up the RIC, the French government has responded to the protests with a series of discussions—online and in person—designed to address what it views as the country’s deepseated political malaise. They focus on four key themes: taxes and public spending, public services, the fossil-fuel transition and “democracy and citizenship,” which includes immigration. Most Yellow Vests view the entire endeavor as a sham, a desperate effort from authorities to redirect popular frustrations into an institutionalized dead end. Ultimately, the movement’s future could hinge on its capacity to set forth a coherent alternative.

For its part, the group in Belleville has committed to more immediate plans. By the end of the meeting, they’ve set a gathering point for the weekend’s protest in Paris. And they’ve vowed to find a better location to keep holding their “popular assemblies” over the winter—preferably indoors.

]]>Cole StanglerTue, 12 Feb 2019 14:18:00 +0000Tax the Hell Out of the Rich, When They’re Alive and When They’re Deadhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21737/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-elizabeth-warren-bernie-sanders-wealth-income-tax/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21737/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-elizabeth-warren-bernie-sanders-wealth-income-tax/An incredible thing has happened in 2019: We’re actually talking seriously about taxing the rich. And the debate is not over whether to do it, but how.

Within the month of January, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders proposed separate measures that would, respectively, increase top marginal tax rates on income, levy a direct tax on wealth and interrupt intergenerational transfers of fortunes.

It’s important to note that these policies are not in any way mutually exclusive: When it comes to billionaires, we can tax them when they’re alive, and we can tax them when they’re dead!

But given that these proposals are already framing the terms of debate for the 2020 presidential contest, we can still ask which approach goes the furthest in abating inequality and removing the stranglehold of billionaires on our politics.

And, it turns out, there are a few different ways to answer that question. Warren’s wealth tax would raise the most money—around $2.75 trillion over the next decade, according to the calculations of experts backing her proposal. But the amount of money added to public coffers isn’t the only factor in evaluating a progressive taxation plan. Somewhat counter-intuitively, taxes on the super-rich should bring in less revenue over time because they are having a broader effect on reducing inequality and therefore the amount of concentrated wealth or income to be taxed.

That’s where two other sets of political considerations come in: How a plan to tax the rich will promote other beneficial effects, like shoring up worker bargaining power, and how it will send a political message and advance a broader working-class agenda.

There are of course also plenty of important details that go into how well a progressive tax plan actually works—how effectively it closes loopholes, how it identifies and counts assets to be taxed, etc. But those are highly technical in nature, and not as easily understood by the general public. So here, I’m going to consider the political messages that, to date, seem best conveyed through each approach.

Warren’s plan: It’s time for the rich to pay their fair share

Warren’s “ultra-millionaire” tax is sweeping in its ambition. It’s also the most radical, in the sense that we haven’t done it before.

Unlike higher income and estate taxes—which were in effect for decades—a wealth tax has primarily been the stuff of progressive economists’ fantasies. What’s more, one of the most popular proposals to date—put forward in a paper by the Institute for Policy Studies—has been a 1 percent tax on the wealthiest 0.1 percent, or those with assets of over $20 million. Warren’s proposal would tax fewer people—those with more than $50 million in assets, an estimated 75,000 families—but she would bump up the rate to 2 percent. Households with more than $1 billion in assets would get a 3 percent rate.

Warren’s proposal is extremely popular. A YouGov poll funded by Data For Progress found 61 percent overall support, including 76 percent support among Democrats and even a plurality of support among Republicans, 44 percent to 37 percent. It’s also earning accolades from center-left economists like Paul Krugman.

That doesn’t mean it’s not shaking up the status quo. At the heart of the policy is a legal argument that it’s not unconstitutional to tax wealth, and a moral and political argument that, in fact, we need to.

Where Warren’s proposal would probably be insufficient on its own is that it wouldn’t offer a particularly aggressive corrective to inequality over time. It would raise trillions for social programs, which is crucially important and would certainly have other beneficial political effects. But, as a result of the tax, the fabulously wealthy would be only slightly less fabulously so.

And while Warren has floated some potential programs that her wealth tax could pay for—universal childcare, student loan relief, millions of units of new affordable housing—campaigning on a wealth tax divorced from a specific political program could make it harder to mobilize people by laying out clear stakes.

Ocasio-Cortez: Tax the Rich or Torch the Planet

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez kicked off this blessed discussion last month, when asked during a “60 Minutes” interview how she would pay for a Green New Deal:

“You look at our tax rates back in the '60s and when you have a progressive tax rate system. Your tax rate, you know, let's say, from zero to $75,000 may be ten percent or 15 percent, et cetera. But once you get to, like, the tippy tops—on your 10 millionth dollar—sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent.”

By even the most optimistic estimates, this would bring in only a quarter of the revenues Warren’s plan would generate.

But at a Wednesday forum hosted by Ocasio-Cortez and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Economic Policy Institute President Thea Lee called hiking marginal rates for top earners the “obvious and optimal starting point.”

Among other political benefits, there’s evidence that higher income tax rates would change the behavioral calculus of owners and CEOs by curbing their bargaining for ever-higher earnings. If the last million dollars someone makes is going to go mostly to taxes anyway, there’s less incentive to fight for it by, for example, keeping employee’s pay stagnant. Along these lines, the Institute for Policy Studies has proposed linking top income tax rates to the minimum wage.

Moreover, while wealth inequality is even greater than income inequality, the latter contributes to the former over time.

The Center for Economic Progress’ Eileen Appelbaum summarized this relationship at Wednesday’s forum. The top earners can’t spend their incomes on themselves, so they use them to buy more assets and continue to get wealthier.

“Unless we do something along the lines of what AOC has suggested, this situation will continue,” said Appelbaum.

Beyond these slightly more technical considerations, AOC’s framing has made the stakes crystal clear: If we want to save the planet, we can’t afford not to tax the rich.

Sanders: Abolish Billionaires

Bernie Sanders’ plan involves restoring top marginal tax rates on inheritances to where they were in the 1970s: 77 percent for estates over $1 billion.

The plan would also decrease the threshold for the inheritance tax from $11.18 million to $3.5 million and impose a 45 percent rate on this lower (but still very rich by any normal standard) tier. Even with this new threshold, just 0.2 percent of Americans would ever pay an estate tax. Thus, in the style of Occupy, the plan is called “For the 99.8 Percent Act.”

Again, Sanders’ plan would probably raise less revenue than Warren’s: About $315 billion over a decade. But by taking aim at the ultra-rich as a class, it also singles out the kind of dynastic wealth that allows a few families to wreak havoc on our political system. Just three families with multi-generational wealth—the Waltons, the Kochs, and the Mars—have a combined fortune of $343 billion, more than 3.5 million times the median wealth of U.S. families. And they use that wealth to fund all manner of right-wing policies.

The Right has steadily chipped away at the effectiveness of our existing estate tax for decades, painting it as a “death tax” on families who just lost loved ones. Admittedly, this plan would require billionaires to die before it raises significant revenue—an estimated $2.2 trillion.

Does that mean it's vulnerable to the "death tax" rhetoric? Maybe. But in a delightfully petty move, the Sanders plan actually lists out how much money the rest of us would get when specific people like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet depart this Earth—$101 billion, $74 billion and $64 billion, respectively.

Taken alongside Sanders’ broader efforts to target Bezos and the Waltons over worker pay, this plan sends a clear message: Billionaires are bad, and the sooner they and their unearned influence kick the solid-gold bucket, the better for the rest of us. And that message is gaining steam.

To achieve left priorities like a Green New Deal, Medicare for All and universal childcare, we probably need some version of all three of these types of taxes. But it’s important to evaluate not just how much of the price tag new progressive taxes would cover, but how they would transform the balance of power, invigorate our politics and mobilize Americans around achieving bold, transformative policies.

]]>Rebecca BurnsFri, 08 Feb 2019 21:43:00 +0000Why Is the Political Establishment So Afraid of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal?http://inthesetimes.com/article/21726/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-green-new-deal-democrats-legislation-nancy-pelosi/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21726/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-green-new-deal-democrats-legislation-nancy-pelosi/At a time of widespread environmental devastation, much of the U.S. political establishment appears allergic to large-scale public projects that would solve the climate crisis through directly challenging the economic status quo.

This attitude was perhaps best encapsulated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s glib mockery of the Green New Deal plan laid out Thursday morning by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.). In an interview with Politico, Pelosi referred to the proposal as “the green dream or whatever they call it.” She went on to suggest that the plan had not been thought through, saying, “nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”

Pelosi is not the only lawmaker who is reflexively resistant to the plan. There is the predictable opposition from Republicans, including Rep. John Shimkus (Ill.), the ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change. He said at a hearing Wednesday, “We should be open to the fact that wealth transfer schemes suggested in the radical policies like the Green New Deal may not be the best path to community prosperity and preparedness.”

Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO), meanwhile, turned to red-baiting, saying the Green New Deal “sounds too much like a Soviet five-year plan.” Lamborn’s critique echoed President Trump, who warned in his State of the Union (SOTU) speech on Tuesday that “in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence—not government coercion, domination and control.”

Pelosi herself has directly aided this anti-socialist appeal. At a CNN Town Hall event in 2017, Pelosi was asked by a New York University student, who cited the growing popularity of socialist policies among Democrats, whether the party “could move farther left to a more populist message?” She responded, “We’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.” In the aftermath of Ocasio-Cortez’s shocking victory last year, Pelosi was asked whether democratic socialism was “ascendant” in the party. Her response: “No.” And when Trump said in his SOTU address Tuesday that “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” Pelosi applauded.

This opposition to democratic socialist policies helps explain why Pelosi has been so resistant to embrace the Democrats’ rising left flank that wants to see immediate action on redistributing wealth and power away from the top echelons of society. Such demands for a radical restructuring of the U.S. economy is a critical element underpinning calls for enacting up-and-coming left-wing policies like the Green New Deal.

Pelosi’s ideological positioning has, not surprisingly, dovetailed with opposition to the Green New Deal. Last year, Ocasio-Cortez joined a demonstration at Pelosi’s office organized by the Sunrise Movement—a youth-led environmental justice group—which called for the creation of a select committee to craft a Green New Deal. Rather than instituting such a committee, however, Pelosi instead created a select committee on climate change more broadly, with powers much more limited scope than what organizers had demanded. Pelosi’s committee, furthemore, will not require members to eschew campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry, another demand laid out by the Sunrise Movement.

Meanwhile, other Democratic leaders are more cagey and guarded. Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), the chair of the U.S. House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, released an ambiguous statement today in which she declined to support the Green New Deal but praised the passion behind it. “We must examine the entire range of tools we have to tackle the climate crisis," she said. “I share the sense of urgency behind the Green New Deal and I believe that we must act boldly to reduce greenhouse gases and to make clean energy a pillar of our economy.”

Completely missing from Republicans’ outright opposition—and some Democrats’ ambiguous hedging—is a recognition of what’s at stake. The planet faces monumental warming with threats not just of sea level rise and expansive droughts but massive bouts of famine, economic devastation and refugee crises. Instead of grappling with the massive destruction wrought by worsening climate change, the political establishment is continuing to deflect the debate toward criticism of those who want action that’s too bold, or public projects that are too ambitious.

Yet this opposition to costly and large-scale legislation apparently doesn’t extend to projects that concern endless war and tax cuts for the wealthy. Bipartisan lawmakers, including Pelosi, handed a major win to Trump last year by passing the staggering $716 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2019, which included funds for a nuclear buildup. Meanwhile, in 2017, Republicans gleefully lined up behind Trump to hand a tax break to corporations and the super-rich that will add nearly $2 trillion to the U.S. debt.

This incongruence is enabled by a media echo chamber. During an interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition” on Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez was grilled by host Steve Inskeep about how she would pay for her climate plan. “It is just certainly a lot of money. You don’t specify where it’s going to come from other than saying it will all pay for itself.” This refrain has been echoed across major media outlets since the concept of a Green New Deal was first introduced, from Politico to “60 Minutes.” As Aylin Woodward notes in Business Insider, "Much of the discussion so far about the Green New Deal has centered on how to pay for its lofty objectives.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s response to Inskeep was instructive. “I think the first move we need to do is kind of break the mistaken idea that taxes pay for 100 percent of government expenditure,” Ocasio-Cortez answered. “It’s just not how government expenditure works,” she said. “We can recoup costs, but oftentimes you look at, for example, the GOP tax cut which I think was an irresponsible use of government expenditure, but government projects are often financed by a combination of taxes, deficit spending and other kinds of investments, you know, bonds and so on.”

She went on to point out the long term failure of a market fundamentalist approach to environmental policy in dealing with climate change. “We have tried their approach for 40 years—to let the private sector take care of it," she explained, laying out a case for massive government intervention that--until recently--has rarely surfaced in mainstream political discourse.

Yet, amazingly, this hostile political climate is failing to squash the Green New Deal. To achieve the goals of staving off the worst effects of climate change while putting the United States on a path to environmental sustainability and economic equity, the Green New Deal calls for eliminating net greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, massively investing in government programs to update infrastructure and build up renewable energy sources, transforming sectors of the economy such as manufacturing and transportation to remove carbon emissions, retrofitting buildings and providing guaranteed living-wage employment to anyone who wants a job.

Not all of the details have been hashed out, and it will no doubt take considerable struggle—and outside agitating—to ensure any final plan is informed by left principles. But, nonetheless, the proposal represents the most ambitious effort yet to tackle the climate crisis. And it correctly refocuses the question of cost away from whether the United States can afford to pay for such a bold proposal to whether it can afford not to.

Already more than 60 members of the House and 9 senators have co-sponsored Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s resolution. Much like other bold left-wing proposals such as Medicare for All and tuition-free college, the Green New Deal has emerged as a consensus policy back by a number of high-profile potential 2020 Democratic nominees such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Bernie Sanders. And over 80 percent of the American public supports the Green New Deal, including 92 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans.

Republicans and centrist Democrats alike seem content continuing to oversee the same economic and political consensus that led us to the brink of climate chaos. But for the vast majority of Americans who want real solutions to the crisis, today’s Green New Deal resolution marks a clear escape path from the stale politics of the past.

Sarah Lazare and Marco Cartolano contributed reporting to this piece.

]]>Miles Kampf-LassinThu, 07 Feb 2019 22:21:00 +0000Volunteers Convicted for Leaving Water Out for Migrantshttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21725/volunteers-convicted-migrants-immigration-border-patrol-humanitarian-aid/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21725/volunteers-convicted-migrants-immigration-border-patrol-humanitarian-aid/TUCSON, ARIZ.—In a crowded courtroom January 15, defense lawyer Chris Dupont asked Michael West, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife officer at the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in the Arizona desert, if he was aware that border crossers were dying in the refuge. Had he found bodies himself? “Yes,” West affirmed. Pressed for an exact number, West said he didn’t know.

Madeline Huse, a volunteer with the Arizona-based humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths, has a clearer memory of the bodies she’s seen along the border. She testified two days later that, in just one month of volunteering in 2016, she and those with her encountered more than a dozen people’s remains. Expert witness Ed McCullough, a retired geologist who maps migrant routes in the desert, described Growler Valley in the Cabeza Prieta refuge as a “trail of deaths.”

On Aug. 13, 2017, in the Growler Valley, West stopped Huse and fellow volunteers Natalie Hoffman, Oona Holcomb and Zaachila Orozco as they were leaving food and water for migrants during one of the deadliest summers on record. By year’s end, the remains of 32 people would be found on the refuge.

Charged with entering a national wildlife refuge without a permit, abandoning property and (in the case of Hoffman, the driver) operating a vehicle in a wilderness area, the four were facing up to six months in prison. Dupont’s defense team argued that the volunteers’ sincerely held values compelled them to aid those who were dying, and that they did not know this was a prosecutable offense.

In total, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands have seen more than 7,000 fatalities (a conservative estimate) since the Clinton administration first deployed the current border enforcement strategy of deterrence in 1994. More walls, more surveillance technologies and more armed agents (from 4,000 in 1994 to 21,000 in 2014) prevented access to the much safer crossing areas in and around cities such as El Paso, Texas; Nogales, Ariz.; and San Diego—pushing people to take longer routes through desolate areas, like Cabeza Prieta.

According to anthropologist Jason De León, who directs the Undocumented Migration Project, “There’s no way you can carry enough water” to make the six-day hike through the desert. You would need 10 gallons, he says, and “the most you can possibly carry is four.”

It was in this context that No More Deaths formed in 2004, to provide direct aid and raise public awareness of the border death crisis. Around the same time, the Border Patrol opened up Camp Grip, a base on the Cabeza Prieta refuge, and began to work more closely with Fish and Wildlife officers like West. Border Patrol’s F-150 trucks and ATVs began to routinely crisscross the protected wilderness, and the agency installed a network of cameras. It was one of those cameras that alerted West to the No More Deaths volunteers’ white pickup truck in 2017.

Unaware they’d been spotted, the four volunteers parked the truck and hiked out into the desert, carrying heavy backpacks full of water and cans of beans into the unbearable 110-degree heat. They couldn’t sit down to rest; the ground was sizzling hot. Jumping cholla cacti punctured their shoes, and they stopped several times to extract the thorns. When they reached the drop-off point, they found clothing, shoes and backpacks left behind by border crossers. “You feel someone else’s presence,” Orozco testified.

When West got in his patrol car to track down the pickup, he may not have realized he was about to be a key actor in the Trump administration’s escalating crackdown on humanitarian assistance on the border. In June 2017, Border Patrol had raided the No More Deaths camp in Arivaca, Ariz., and arrested four undocumented border crossers who were receiving medical treatment. A month later, the wildlife refuge (with input from the Department of the Interior and Department of Defense) amended the permit stipulations with a new paragraph prohibiting people from leaving food and water—intentionally targeting No More Deaths.

West waited at the white pickup for the volunteers, questioned them and asked them to leave the refuge. He confiscated the cache of water jugs and beans the volunteers had dropped off and took the crates to the refuge office. There, he photographed the “property,” lining the crates up side by side as if he had busted drug runners. In December 2017, the Trump Justice Department would use his report as evidence in filing charges.

On January 18, Magistrate Judge Bernardo Velasco found the four volunteers guilty on all counts, rebuking them for defiling a “pristine nature” (no mention that Border Patrol roads have been decried by environmental groups). The trial was the first of four No More Deaths cases to be adjudicated this year. One defendant, Scott Warren, faces felony charges and up to 20 years in prison for providing medical assistance.

“I didn’t understand,” said Orozco during her testimony, “that humanitarian aid was criminal.”

]]>Todd MillerThu, 07 Feb 2019 19:02:00 +0000Trump Is Not an Isolationist—Just Listen to His SOTUhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21719/state-of-the-union-address-donald-trump-foreign-policy-iran-north-korea/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21719/state-of-the-union-address-donald-trump-foreign-policy-iran-north-korea/Alongside the chants of “U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!” in which both Democrats and Republicans participated, President Donald Trump’s State of the Union (SOTU) address revealed a deep truth. The Trump administration is not, as a wide range of media outlets have claimed, isolationist. Rather, it is simply re-adjusting strategies for achieving and maintaining a violent U.S.-led global capitalist hegemony, which should not be mistaken for abandoning the project.

Trump repeatedly bemoaned the involvement of the United States in “foolish wars.” Yet, he also boasted of his administration’s massive increases to the military budget, which came in at $717 billion for 2018 and are slated to include another $750 billion in 2019.

He took credit for the supposedly impending withdrawal of U.S. ground forces from Syria and drawdown of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But he bragged about exiting the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) that the United States signed in 1987 with then-Soviet Russia to curtail the two countries’ nuclear build-ups and reduce the risk of nuclear war. Trump said that if the United States and Russia can’t agree to a new version of the INF, possibly one that includes China, America will “outspend and out-innovate all others by far,” suggesting a willingness to re-start an arms race. While he correctly identified a war on the Korean peninsula as undesirable, evidently a nuclear confrontation with Russia doesn’t constitute a “foolish war.”

The political center of gravity of the speech showed an unwavering commitment to imperial fiat. In his SOTU, Trump reiterated his imperial decree that the president of Venezuela is parliamentarian Juan Guaidó. “Two weeks ago, the United States officially recognized the legitimate government of Venezuela, and its new interim President, Juan Guaidó. We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom,” Trump said to bipartisan applause, despite the fact that 80 percent of Venezuelans had never heard of Guaidó until two weeks ago.

Trump went on to claim that the Venezuelan government’s “socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair.” Yet, illegal sanctions enacted by the United States, European Union and Canada have played a critical role in Venezuela’s current crisis. These sanctions have also led to the deaths of Venezuelan citizens, according to both a United Nations special rapporteur and FUNDALATIN, a Venezuelan human rights group with special consultative status at the UN.

White House National Security Advisor John Bolton left no doubt about U.S. motives for involvement in Venezuela when he toldFox Business last month that regime change would be good for American business interests. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, one of the key players in the effort to overthrow Maduro, also cited alleged benefits to the U.S. economy as a justification for U.S. involvement.

The imperial diktats Trump issued in last night’s address didn’t end in Latin America: They extended all the way to the Middle East. He claimed his administration “has acted decisively to confront the world's leading state sponsor of terror: the radical regime in Iran,” despite the total lack of evidence for such a characterization of the Iranian government. “To ensure this corrupt dictatorship never acquires nuclear weapons,” Trump continued, “I withdrew the United States from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal.”

Trump declined to note that, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there was never any “credible evidence” that Iran was working on a nuclear weapons program. Democrats declined to cheer these comments, presumably because the Iran nuclear deal is generally seen as one of the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy achievements.

Trump celebrated inflicting on Iran what he called “the toughest sanctions ever imposed on a country,” measures with devastating effects on Iranian civilians. The efforts to crush Iran and Venezuela are connected. Officials in the Trump administration toldThe Wall Street Journal that the gambit in Venezuela is not only about U.S. efforts to remake that country but also all of Latin America, particularly the left-wing governments of Nicaragua and Cuba with whom Venezuela has partnered. The paper reports that the Trump government is worried about “[r]ecent inroads made by Russia, China and Iran” in Latin America and that “[p]art of why U.S. officials express concern about Iran’s influence in the region is that Iran is a major backer of Hezbollah, and its South American operations are a significant source of cash.”

Alongside his bluster toward supposed enemy states, Trump also boasted about his administration’s decision to move the United States’ Israeli embassy to Jerusalem and declare the city Israel’s capital—a long-time goal of the U.S. Right. That maneuver served as a key plank in the administration’s efforts to permanently smash Palestinian aspirations through what Trump calls “the ultimate deal,” a plan to isolate the Palestinians regionally—and compel them to pretend that a discontiguous, non-sovereign fraction of the West Bank constitutes a state and surrender the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.

The U.S. goal is to dominate the region through its proxies in Israel and in the pro-American governments of most states in the Middle East. For that to happen, the dispossession of the Palestinians has to be normalized so that friendships between Israel and other U.S. allies in the region can deepen, a process that has been underwayfor years. Such a pro-U.S. regional bloc could weaken the forces American planners and their Middle Eastern partners see as obstacles, namely Iran and its allies, particularly Hezbollah. One of those pro-U.S. dictatorships, Saudi Arabia, was conspicuously absent from the SOTU as was the murderous war that the United States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are continuing to carry out (with Canadian and British complicity) against Yemen.

A number of the Democrats recently elected to Congress seem to see through the mainstream media’s conception of Trump’s administration as “isolationist," and a few have pushed back on aspects of U.S. imperialism. California Rep. Ro Khanna rejected U.S. meddling in Venezuela, and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted that “A US-backed coup in Venezuela is not a solution to the dire issues they face. Trump's efforts to install a far right opposition will only incite violence and further destabilize the region.” Omar and Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib have both been outspoken in their criticism of U.S. policy toward Israel.

However, these voices remain a minority in the Democratic caucus. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) applauded almost all of Trump’s imperial sabre-rattling during the SOTU. If the U.S. war machine is going to be reined in, the driving force will have to come from outside of Congress. It certainly won’t come from the White House.

]]>Gregory ShupakWed, 06 Feb 2019 21:34:00 +0000Of Course Undocumented People Should Have Guaranteed Healthcare. NYC Is Making It a Reality.http://inthesetimes.com/article/21714/bill-de-blasio-new-york-city-healthcare-medicare-for-all-undocumented/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21714/bill-de-blasio-new-york-city-healthcare-medicare-for-all-undocumented/In early January, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a new citywide healthcare program he claimed will enshrine universal coverage in the city. “From this moment on in New York City everyone is guaranteed the right to healthcare,” he announced on MSNBC. “We are saying the word ‘guarantee’ because we can make it happen.”

While the plan won’t equate to a Medicare for All policy of the type being pushed on the national level, it nonetheless represents a heartening step forward. “It’s the boldest step that can be taken at the city level,” says Katherine Robbins, Director of the single-payer advocacy coalition Campaign for New York Health. “De Blasio was very clear at the press conference that this proposal is no replacement for single-payer at the state or national level, but it shows there is momentum on this issue."

De Blasio’s plan also includes healthcare for undocumented city residents—a critical step at a moment the far right has scapegoated immigrants to fire up a racist, xenophobic base.

The plan is two-pronged and geared toward the city’s estimated 600,000 residents currently without health insurance. The roughly half of these residents who qualify for MetroPlus—a managed care plan sold on the state exchanges with a network of public providers—will be targeted for expanded enrollment in that program, which one spokesperson from the mayor’s office dubbed a city-level “public option.” The remaining 300,000 are believed to be undocumented individuals whose immigration status renders them ineligible for most insurance. For them, de Blasio’s plan will strive to connect patients directly with local public providers.

Expanding healthcare access this way is uniquely possible in New York, which boasts the largest city-level public hospital system in the country. While uninsured people can already get care at these facilities without handing over information about their immigration status, such services are neither well coordinated nor publicized. The estimated $100 million budget for NY Care will largely be used to streamline the patient experience, with the mayor’s office promising shorter wait times and an emphasis on on-boarding patients into the system for preventive rather than emergency services, creating a continuity of care for a population that rarely has it.

Few populations are as persistently without health insurance as the undocumented. Their legal status makes it nearly impossible to hold jobs that provide employer-sponsored insurance, which continues to be the primary source of Americans’ health coverage, and programs like Medicaid and Medicare seriously restrict the participation of undocumented adults. Even the Affordable Care Act bars unauthorized immigrants from purchasing policies on the state exchanges, with or without federal subsidies. The result is that coverage rates for undocumented New Yorkers hovers at around 40 percent, a figure representing mostly children and those insured as dependents of legal residents.

Given the undocumented community’s staggering uninsurance rates, incremental measures to expand coverage have long been championed by immigrant advocates. Beyond the obvious good of securing healthcare for people who need it, this serves a practical political purpose. “It makes it easier to deliver on the promise of single-payer if we make incremental steps in the mean-time,” says Claudia Calhoon of the New York Immigration Coalition, which is part of the coalition supporting the New York Health Act—a statewide single-payer bill. “We’re always trying to talk to people about why it’s good for everyone to have insurance, it’s not a zero-sum game.”

Bringing more undocumented people into the system in the short-term will both enlarge the constituency likely to fight to defend those gains while also refuting the right-wing talking point that covering undocumented communities will somehow hobble the American healthcare system.

If the so-called “safety net” hospitals have long been a critical source of care for marginalized people, that role hasn’t necessarily been emphasized by public officials. That the de Blasio administration is outwardly championing healthcare services for undocumented residents is a significant contrast from the rhetoric and policies of President Trump who has made anti-immigration fervor a signature of his political brand.

“In this political climate it’s really important to have pro-immigrant rhetoric from New York State,” Robbins says. “It’s one of the issues that will be used to divide the movement.” This is particularly true given the degree to which an imagined drain on the welfare state is used to stoke xenophobic sentiments, and the demonstrated history of excluding undocumented populations from public insurance programs. Plans like de Blasio’s (and the “Healthy San Francisco” program on which it was modeled) can help set a precedent for immigrant inclusion before these political battles advance at the state or national level.

For now, the impact of the reform on individual lives will depend on the sliding scale pricing mechanism and outreach initiatives, which have yet to be announced. How patients’ ongoing communication with the healthcare system is managed—including cultural competency and clarity—will be key.

“Getting the word out and understanding how it works will be really important,” Calhoon says. “In general, people are really excited.”

]]>Natalie ShureTue, 05 Feb 2019 00:44:00 +0000Instead of Enriching Shareholders, These Companies Could Give 8 Million Workers a $46,000 Raisehttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21713/stock-buy-back-wealth-workers-shareholders-nike-amazon-visa-express/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21713/stock-buy-back-wealth-workers-shareholders-nike-amazon-visa-express/During the most recent fiscal year, the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average gave $378.5 billion to shareholders. That translates to more than $46,000 for each of their combined 8 million employees.

Publicly traded companies—like Nike, Coca-Cola and Apple—have many options for how to spend their profits. Historically, companies spent their profits reinvesting in their business through research and development, mergers and acquisitions, capital expenditures, and workforce training and increased salaries. Today, corporations are spending the majority of their profits on share repurchases and dividends, which enrich executives and shareholders while stiffing workers.

When companies repurchase shares, the stock price often goes up, which investors like, and which prior to SEC rule changes in 1982 was viewed as illegal price manipulation. In addition, earnings per share increase, a metric that is often used to determine executive bonuses. The rise in the stock price at the time share buyback programs are announced allows executives to sell their shares and profit from their own actions. Research conducted by Securities and Exchange Commissioner Robert J. Jackson, Jr. found alarming evidence of corporate executives using share repurchases to sell their own stock, putting more company money into their own pockets.

In 1982, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a rule that sets conditions under which publicly-traded companies can repurchase shares without being in violation of anti-fraud provisions. Since then, share repurchases have steadily risen, from averaging 4 percent of corporate net income in 1983, to 27 percent by 1986, and 50 percent from 2007 to 2016. Combined with dividends, corporations spent 92 percent of net profits on shareholder payments between 2007 and 2016.

Meanwhile, real average hourly wages in 2018 are the same as they were in 1978.

If you work for any of these companies, management is choosing to pay you far less than they could. Instead, management is shifting more money to the already very wealthy. The richest 10 percent of Americans own 84 percent of the value of shares of stock. The National Institute on Retirement Security found that 57 percent of working-age adults—over 100 million people—do not have any retirement account assets, and for people with retirement accounts, the median account balance is $0.

In their most recent full fiscal years, 27 out of the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average repurchased shares, spending a combined $220.3 billion. All 30 companies issued dividends totaling $158.2 billion.

For example, Home Depot employed 413,000 workers throughout North America, paying a median wage of $21,095, which was below the U.S. poverty line for a family of four in 2017. But it paid shareholders $12.2 billion, or $29,540 per worker. Home Depot could have doubled worker’s wages and still given almost $3.5 billion to shareholders.

Nike, Coca-Cola and Visa each could have quadrupled the pay of their median employee with the cash they sent to shareholders. Nike paid a median wage of $24,955, which is under the poverty threshold for a family of four, but spent $58,194 per worker on share repurchases and $17,004 per worker on dividends. Coca-Cola paid a median wage of $47,312 but gave shareholders $162,136 per employee. Visa’s median wage was a healthy $132,483, but it gave shareholders $535,882 per worker.

B­­y far the worst example was Apple. For its fiscal year that ended September 29, 2018, Apple spent an incredible $72.7 billion repurchasing shares and distributed another $13.7 billion in dividends. Apple’s median wage was $55,426, while it gave shareholders $654,924 per worker, more than 11 times the median wage of their 132,000 employees.

It’s difficult to quantify the economy-wide impact of this shift in wealth. In 2017, the U.S. median household income was $61,372. Median income for men was $44,408 and median income for women was $31,610. Imagine if several million workers had an extra $10,000 a year to spend on their families. Or $20,000. Or $100,000. Much of that money would circulate in local economies rather than sitting in a small number of investment accounts.

Even if stock buybacks are curbed, as legislation introduced by Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) aims to do, worker wages can still be diverted to dividend payments, or companies can simply sit on piles of cash, as many have been doing. The Reward Work Act also proposes that workers pick one third of the boards of publicly traded companies, which would attempt to address one root cause of the problem: most workers have very little say in what happens to the wealth their labor creates.

A better solution would be to make it easier for workers to join a union. It’s not surprising that income inequality has risen as private sector unionization has dropped. Unions give workers a seat at the table to negotiate how a company’s profits are spent. Right now, with private sector unionization at one of its lowest points over the last 100 years, there’s no check on corporations further enriching the wealthy at the expense of their workforce.

The chart below looks at the most recent fiscal year of all 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The analysis, for the most part, doesn’t reflect the higher share repurchases expected to be reported for 2018 due to corporate tax cuts.

Note: The data is for the most recent fiscal year reported on each company’s Form 10-K and Proxy Statement. The median worker pay for each company is what was reported in the most recent Proxy Statement as is now required by the Dodd-Frank financial reform act. There are some limitations to using this figure: Companies include in their calculation workers from around the world and both full- and part-time workers, and companies can include the value of employer provided health insurance and retirement benefits.

]]>Colleen BoyleMon, 04 Feb 2019 19:46:00 +0000The Green New Deal Must Put Utilities Under Public Controlhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21708/green-new-deal-community-ownership-electric-utilities-renewable-energy/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21708/green-new-deal-community-ownership-electric-utilities-renewable-energy/Highland Park, Mich., is a small, majority-black community of three square miles, nestled in the center of Detroit, with some of the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the country. It’s suffered a series of indignities and setbacks over the years: a state emergency management takeover of the city and surrounding areas; a state takeover of the public water infrastructure; public school closures; and a collapse of tax revenue fueled by white flight, fossil-fuel-driven suburban development, and the rapid decline of the housing market and auto industries.

Residents were hit again when, in 2011, an armada of flatbed trucks with workers bearing DTE Energy logos moved through the city and started pulling streetlight poles out of the ground. Residents watched from their porches as their infrastructure was taken away in real time.

DTE Energy, the area’s investor-owned monopoly energy utility, repossessed over 1,000 streetlights from Highland Park because of $4 million in unpaid electric bills accumulated over many years. (To put that in context, the city’s debt to the utility was still significantly less than what DTE’s CEO, Gerard Anderson, took home in compensation that year: $5.4 million.)

The repossession prompted Highland Park residents to organize and put up their own solar street lights. But it also forced the community to reckon with deeper questions of how DTE treated residents. A 2017 survey of 70 Highland Park households conducted by Soulardarity, a nonprofit and community organizing group, found that close to half of those polled had trouble paying their electrical bills. A quarter had experienced gas or electricity shutoffs, the majority of which were during Michigan’s cold winter months. Nonetheless, DTE has proposed additional extensive rate hikes, raising money that goes in large part to maintain their current coal plants, build new fossil fuel plants and pay their CEOs millions.

While DTE’s actions are shameful, they aren’t too different from the behaviors of many investor-owned utilities in the United States.

The Green New Deal advocated by members of Congress and presidential hopefuls, including Detroit’s own freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib, promises rapid action on climate change. While the Green New Deal should encompass a massive range of initiatives, a cornerstone must be a program to free communities from the unjust power of investor-owned utilities—not only for de-carbonization, but in order to transform our economy so it serves everyone. Modeled after the original New Deal’s Rural Electrification Administration, such a program could give communities the much-needed finance and capacity to kick out their investor-owned utilities in favor of community-run, renewable-powered utilities.

The problem with investor-owned utilities

DTE and its fellow investor-owned utilities have a long history prioritizing money-making over the needs of communities or the environment. As companies that are largely traded on the stock market, their primary driver is shareholder gain and growth. They dump pollution on poor people and people of color, situating their noxious fossil fuel plants, landfills, incinerators or refineries in black and brown neighborhoods, where the residents have less capital—be it time, money or political influence—to object.

Households in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color across U.S. cities experience a higher-than-average energy burden—a higher ratio of energy costs to earned income—in part because they often live in older, energy-inefficient buildings. The investor-owned utilities also use regressive pricing mechanisms that squeeze the poor to the benefit of their shareholders and higher-use ratepayers: High-energy commercial users get lower rates, while ordinary consumers who seek to save money through conserving energy or installing solar systems find themselves being hit with higher fixed rates from utilities just to get access.

Throughout Wayne County, which includes Highland Park and Detroit, households at 50 percent or less of the poverty level are spending a stunning 30 percent of their income on energy—three times the threshold that qualifies as living in “energy poverty.” And across the country, much as in Highland Park, shutoffs are an all-too regular occurrence, putting residents at risk of being without air conditioning in extreme heat, home heating in extreme cold, or even the ability to operate life-supporting medical equipment.

These big companies consolidate political power through campaign contributions, lobbying and tactical philanthropy. They have built up serious political and economic machines where they operate, often so much so that the regulators bend to their will, quashing community needs. For example, Dominion Energy of Virginia is the largest corporate contributor to electoral campaigns in the state. “No single company even comes close to Dominion in terms of its wide-ranging influence and impact on Virginia politics and government,” says Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia professor.

The private utility industry shows no meaningful sign of being willing—or even able—to adapt to the urgent need for a shift to renewable energy. In large part, this is because their business model revolves around a centralized distribution system and a deeply-vested interest in fossil fuel infrastructure, from pipelines to power plants. These companies have used their economic and political machines to dig in their heels in on the energy transition—from fighting rooftop solar tooth and nail to changing rate structures in ways that make renewable energy financially infeasible.

While some investor-owned utilities are starting to shift to renewable energy, their compulsion to recoup their sunk costs and obligation to generate shareholder profits continually impede progress. If not for pressure from municipalization campaigns in Boulder, Colo., and Minneapolis, Minn., the much-lauded electric utility Xcel may not have made commitments to increase its use of renewable energy so quickly.

Where they’ve given in to renewables, investor-owned utilities actively campaign against any projects that would fall outside of their ownership. For example, DTE has been pushing a proposal that would change how net metering works—a move that could seriously hurt rooftop solar because those who have it would benefit less from the energy they contribute to the grid. In response to DTE’s proposal, Becky Stanfield, senior regional director of Vote Solar says, “It is very clear that DTE is trying to put a dagger in the heart of rooftop solar in Michigan.”

This is especially problematic because we only have 12 years to implement a 45 percent reduction in our collective greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, according to the latest report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The United States is already feeling the effects of climate change, with the costs disproportionately falling on low-income communities and people of color. The investor-owned utilities’ persistence in a climate-change-fueling business model is a threat to us all.

Time to take the power

This failure begs the question: Is it time to liberate ourselves from for-profit utilities in favor of community control? By cutting ties with investor-owned utilities to build new, publicly owned and operated energy utilities, communities could put themselves back in charge of decision-making, seek to lower their energy burden, transition more rapidly to renewable energy and place equity at the center of energy policy.

Now elected officials like Tlaib and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have teamed up with climate activists to demand adoption of a “Green New Deal.” Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal mandates the rapid elimination of fossil fuel use and calls for a renewable, resilient energy future with “social, economic, racial, regional and gender-based justice and equality” at the core.

Community control of utilities is a key way to deliver on a just Green New Deal. One way to bring this about is to have the federal government fund this ownership shift through patient, low- to no-interest loans (as well as grants and other incentives) to support the creation of community-owned, nonprofit utilities, allowing communities to ditch their current for-profit utility contracts and take over their local wires.

The parallel: electrifying rural America

This is not unprecedented. The U.S. government took very similar steps in the 1930s when Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act as part of the New Deal to supply power to areas that for-profit companies had written off as unprofitable.

When that act was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, investor-owned utilities had left nine out of 10 rural homes without access to electricity. Writes author John L. Neufeld in his book, Selling Power: Economics, Policy and Electric Utilities Before 1940, “Stories abounded of farmers coming individually and in groups to utility executives begging for service, only to be flatly rejected, even when their need came from illness in the family and even when they were close to an existing power line.”

This created deep divides between America’s cities and country, leaving rural areas behind. “Beyond [city limits] lies darkness,” wrote one advocate for rural electrification. Rural residents were subject to grueling labor each day, with women bearing a disproportionate burden of the back-breaking work. Without running water, gas or electricity, processes like laundry and cooking took much longer, detracting from women’s ability to make life richer and fuller, recounts William Leuchtenburg in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Through the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, Roosevelt launched the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) as a way to jumpstart rural electrification by providing long-term, patient capital in the form of low- to no-interest loans. Originally, they were offered to for-profit utilities, but the utilities rejected the loans, continuing to deem REA projects unprofitable. But, farmers and rural communities applied in huge numbers to start electric cooperatives, public power districts and municipal utilities in order to bring electricity to their areas. In 1935, Congress appropriated $410 million in loans over the first 10 years of the program (more than $7.5 billion in 2019 dollars), and within a decade of opening up the program, rural areas went from having little to no electricity to more than 90 percent electrification, spurring faster growth of rural economies. Nearly all of the loans were fully repaid and the ultimate cost to the taxpayer was low. REA is now considered one of the most successful of the New Deal agencies.

While REA controlled the flow of federal funds to the region and supervised their use, communities were given a substantial amount of autonomy to build out electrification in their areas and were largely owned and operated by customer-owners. As Brian Cannon describes in his analysis of rural electric co-ops in the West, “Power Relations: Western Rural Electric Cooperatives and the New Deal,” “Although REA programs were planned and administered in Washington, D.C., western residents rather than New Deal administrators initiated most of the region’s rural electrification efforts.”

REA provided important technical and legal capacity to support the localities, helping the newly formed cooperatives and publicly owned utilities with contract negotiation, management techniques, auditing, construction of their systems and even with shaping new norms around how to integrate electrification into rural lifestyles. Today, there are more than 900 rural electric cooperatives that started through the program. The administration is now housed under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and continues to provide loans to rural areas for new investments in their grids.

The proposal: Community Ownership Power Administration

Current investor-owned utilities think of shifting to renewable energy in much the same way as the utilities of the 1930s thought of rural electrification, as a non-economic social good, and have actively opposed being mandated to act. This clear market failure, along with investor-owned utilities’ immense political power, has stymied action on many community solar, energy-efficiency and non-exploitative rate projects across the country.

A Green New Deal should emancipate communities from these investor-owned utilities, fixing the market failure by deploying the much-needed finance and capacity to kick out their incumbent utilities for publicly run, renewable-powered ones. The reality is that the new, renewable grid we are trying to build will be based on more decentralized assets amenable to the scale of local power, not the old, top-down model of investor-owned utilities.

To do so, we advocate implementing what we call the Community Ownership Power Administration (COPA), a financing and technical capacity program similar to the REA of the first New Deal. COPA would provide a catalytic tool for a new energy system based on local, community benefit. Municipalities, counties, states and sovereign tribal nations could gain the necessary legal authority along with access to a suite of patient financing and funding mechanisms—including low-to-no-interest loans, grants and other incentives—needed to terminate their contracts with investor-owned utilities, buy back the energy grid to form a public or cooperative utility, and invest in a resilient, renewable system.

The funds could be used by the community utilities to invest in a vibrant local economy. Working with community members, the utilities could build or spur projects in energy efficiency, grid resiliency, shared solar and electrification, and provide affordable energy rates, good jobs and access to community-based enterprise along the way.

This approach could increase buy-in from organized labor, as well. Unions have historically pushed back on renewable energy developments since utility and fossil fuel companies have typically had union representation, while renewable energy companies to date have largely not been unionized. The public sector’s higher rate of unionization—about five times higher than private sector workers—could increase unions’ trust that a publicly-owned utility would secure labor agreements with fair wages and good working conditions throughout their operations and contracted work.

These community-based utilities could even take over other public goods—such as broadband internet and water—to ensure that these necessities are owned and operated by the communities that use them. Already more than 800 communities in the United States have invested in public or cooperative broadband networks to provide affordable, locally controlled access to telecommunications.

Much like the REA, COPA would also provide technical assistance that helps communities navigate legal and technological challenges throughout the takeover and startup process. The program could even help to provide ideas and guidelines for setting up institutions that allow for participatory democracy, distributed ownership and delivering on a vibrant economy, while still leaving room for local design.

These utilities could implement multi-stakeholder boards, where workers, community members and elected officials make decisions together. They could also include consistent neighborhood meetings on topics ranging from workforce needs to how rates are affecting residents to new renewable energy projects in order to decentralize participation and draw upon local knowledge—be it technical expertise or pure lived experience—across their service area. These meetings would provide avenues for petitioning and enable better mechanisms for transparent, accessible information. While REA mobilized electrification and broadened community asset ownership, many of the rural electric cooperatives of today operate as “old boys’ clubs” without clear avenues for community members to engage or even know they have an ownership stake. By taking clear steps to democratize community utilities, COPA iterates upon and builds better institutions that will specifically ensure that low-income residents and communities of color have access and agency in this process.

To date, communities that have municipalized utilitites have financed the takeover of investor-owned utilities largely through municipal revenue bonds. They are generally a major way for states and localities to pay for large, expensive capital projects, but they are also a major constraint on what cities can do. Municipal bonds, which are traded on the financial market, require payback with interest, with rates higher for poorer cities as a result of low credit ratings from private rating firms. The COPA program would help by providing multiple low-cost financing pathways to make the transition more affordable and accessible for communities across the United States.

Beyond financing newly formed community utilities, COPA could also provide financing or funding to already existing publicly- or cooperatively-owned utilities transitioning to more renewable projects. The policies and subsidies that the United States has provided up to now for the energy transition, and infrastructure writ large, have been too focused on for-profit companies instead of communities or local governments—essentially giving away public funds to profit the 1%. As Ocasio-Cortez puts it, “For far too long, we gave money to Tesla [and to other technology entrepreneurs], and we got no return on the investment that the public made in new technologies. It’s the public that financed innovative new technologies.”

A related problem: since publicly owned utilities or nonprofits don’t pay taxes, they currently cannot take advantage of federal investment or production tax credits to finance a renewable energy project. As a consequence, they end up contracting with a for-profit corporation that constructs and owns the renewable energy assets, and claims the tax credit. This has led to privatization of our renewable energy assets instead of direct investment and ownership by communities and local governments.

COPA would avoid this. Instead of continuing to consolidate wealth among high-paid CEOs and shareholders, community utilities could reinvest wealth back into the grid and the larger community. COPA would help by redirecting public investments to public institutions, focusing on creating value for communities through a renewable energy future.

In designing the Green New Deal, we must call for change that not only helps us meet our climate goals, but shifts the very structure of the institutions that created the problem to begin with. It means putting public goods under public control, providing clear pathways for communities like Highland Park to take energy into their own hands and build utilities that are for and by the people.

Highland Parkers have organized to install solar street lights, weatherize homes and bulk-purchase solar. They’ve also created a proposal for citywide solar lighting and the Blueprint for Energy Democracy, a community-wide plan to achieve sustainability. With support through the Green New Deal and COPA, Highland Park can build on this organizing to become a model of what local power can do.

]]>Jackson Koeppel, Johanna Bozuwa and Liz VeazeyFri, 01 Feb 2019 16:00:00 +0000There’s a Vanishing Resource We’re Not Talking Abouthttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21669/anthropology-humanity-survival-cultural-diversity/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21669/anthropology-humanity-survival-cultural-diversity/Within 100 years, many of our cities will become uninhabitable, submerged under oceans or deadly hot. Food will be more difficult to grow. Storms will become more violent. The gentle planet we’ve known will be no more.

I turned to anthropology, and found that the prevailing thinking on humans’ knack for survival has changed since my intro class. Scientists are no longer as impressed with individual human cleverness. Many animals, from macaws to chimpanzees to otters, are adept at innovative problem-solving.

Instead, a growing school of evolutionary biology believes that our ability to adapt to climates, from the Arctic to the Sahara, is because of our cultural diversity and ability to pass on detailed knowledge for generations. Anthropologist Joseph Henrich observes:

Surviving in this immense diversity of habitats depended not on specific genetic adaptations, but on large bodies of culturally transmitted know-how, abilities and skills that no single individual could figure out in his or her lifetime (e.g., blowguns, animal tracking). Many an explorer has perished in supposedly 'harsh' environments in which local adolescents would have easily survived.

We are a young, genetically homogenous species. Where others rely on genetic diversity for survival, we rely on a staggering diversity of cultures.

Or we used to. “Capitalist economies that stress on nonstop economic growth ... are paving the way to the homogenization of cultures and landscapes,” warned 13 biologists and researchers in the journal Conservation & Society in 2009. Land grabs, efforts to “modernize” indigenous ways of life, consumerism and urbanization, among other forces, are driving a cultural die-off. One rough proxy is language: Of Earth’s roughly 7,000 languages, one becomes extinct every other week.

That loss threatens not only “the capacity of human systems to adapt to change,” the Conservation & Society writers warn, but ecosystems as a whole. Numerous studies have linked linguistic diversity and biodiversity. Lose local languages, and you lose local species.

That is likely because the vanishing languages and cultures belong to indigenous peoples. “Land is revered and respected ... in virtually every indigenous cosmovision,” says ecosystem and sustainability researcher Víctor M. Toledo.

“What ends up happening when we lose linguistic diversity is we lose a bunch of small groups with traditional economics,” explains Professor Larry J. Gorenflo of Penn State University, who has studied the link between linguistic and biological diversity. “Indigenous languages tend to be replaced by those associated with a modern industrial economy accompanied by other changes such as the introduction of chain saws. In terms of biodiversity conservation, all bets are off.”

Indigenous peoples have served as the Earth’s staunchest environmental stewards in the face of 500 years of violent colonialist encroachment. According to Global Witness, more than 50 indigenous defenders of the land were murdered in 2017 alone. The 22 percent of the world’s land indigenous people occupy holds 80 percent of its species, as well as swaths of forest that represent a last bulwark against climate change.

To me, this suggests that rather than trust in individual cleverness to mitigate climate change, we might draw on our remaining cultural diversity and turn to indigenous peoples for leadership.

I’m not alone. The U.N. and even the World Bank have recommended centering indigenous peoples in climate planning. A 2016 report by the Obama administration’s USDA suggested that the U.S. look to its 562 tribal nations: “It is detrimental for the federal government to exclude tribes in climate-change initiatives because long histories of adaptation in response to colonialism, genocide, forced relocation and climatic events have provided tribes with extensive experience with resistance, resilience and adaptation.”

What’s more, indigenous people can offer “an ethical framework for adaptation plans.” The report quotes Terry Williams, of the Tulalip Tribes Natural Resources Department: “We were taught that we’re the caretakers of the land. I tell our people that, if nothing else, we can set the example.”

Or, as new U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), of the Laguna Pueblo, puts it: “Our cultural practices take into deep regard the harmony that must exist between people and the land—if we are to sustain ourselves and create such a path for future generations.”

]]>Jessica StitesThu, 31 Jan 2019 22:34:00 +0000How Capitalism Turned Women Into Witcheshttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21592/capitalism-witches-women-witch-hunting-sylvia-federici-caliban/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21592/capitalism-witches-women-witch-hunting-sylvia-federici-caliban/The Italian socialist feminist Silvia Federici is mandatory reading to understand gender politics in 2019. The opening sentences of her 1975 pamphlet “Wages Against Housework”—“They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work”—will stick in your head and change your whole concept of family. Caliban and the Witch, her titanic 1998 work on witch trials as a tool of early capitalism, will take your head apart and put it back together.

Federici is not just relevant but getting more so every second. Throughout her work, she traces how capitalism affects and infects the “private,” feminine sphere of unwaged domestic and reproductive work; she excavates intimacy, uncovering all its toxic layers of lead paint and asbestos, until its exploitative foundations are clear. Her work is essential to decoding the present moment, as capitalism and patriarchy entwine to produce increasingly grotesque offspring: predatory adoption agencies coercing women into giving up their babies; the exorbitant cost of childcare causing single working mothers to go bankrupt; entire industries where the opportunity to abuse women with impunity is a perk for the powerful men up top. And, thank goodness, we seem to know it; half the young leftist women writing today are riffing on Federici’s work.

Federici’s latest,Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women, updates and expands the core thesis of Caliban, in which she argued that “witch hunts” were a way to alienate women from the means of reproduction. In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Federici argues, there was an intervening revolutionary push toward communalism. Communalist groups often embraced “free love” and sexual egalitarianism—unmarried men and women lived together, and some communes were all-women—and even the Catholic church only punished abortion with a few years’ penance.

For serfs, who tilled the land in exchange for a share of its crops, home was work, and vice versa; men and women grew the potatoes together. But in capitalism, waged laborers have to work outside the home all the time, which means someone else needs to be at home all the time, doing the domestic work. Gender roles, and the subjugation of women, became newly necessary.

Early feudal elites in rural Europe enclosed public land, rendering it private and controllable, and patriarchy enclosed women in “private” marriages, imposing on them the reproductive servitude of bearing men’s children and the emotional labor of caring for men’s every need. Pregnancy and childbirth, once a natural function, became a job that women did for their male husband-bosses—that is to say, childbirth became alienated labor. “Witches,” according to witch-hunting texts like the Malleus Maleficarum, were women who kept childbirth and pregnancy in female hands: midwives, abortionists, herbalists who provided contraception. They were killed to cement patriarchal power and create the subjugated, domestic labor class necessary for capitalism.

“The body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers,” Federici writes in Caliban, “the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance.”

The elegance of this argument, the neat way it knots together public and private, is thrilling. There are moments when Federici makes sense like no one else. In this passage, she explains how sexuality—once demonized “to protect the cohesiveness of the Church as a patriarchal, masculine clan”—became subjugated within capitalism: “Once exorcised, denied its subversive potential through the witch hunt, female sexuality could be recuperated in a matrimonial context and for procreative ends. ...In capitalism, sex can exist but only as a productive force at the service of procreation and the regeneration of the waged/male worker and as a means of social appeasement and compensation for the misery of everyday existence.”

In other words: A man can fuck his wife to produce a son and heir, and he can fuck a sex worker to blow off steam, but it serves him well to keep the sex worker criminalized and the wife dependent; both are workers, and he, as the boss, does not want them to start making demands. See: the Stormy Daniels-Donald Trump saga, or men’s panicked reaction to #MeToo when the women they’ve treated as luxury goods start talking back.

The pleasures of Witches occur in quick little bursts of illumination. Federici dips in and out of her famous argument, expanding it, updating it and finding new angles on it. Some essays work better than others. Her exploration of gossip and its criminalization is a stand-out; she traces a concise and damning history of how “a term commonly indicating a close female friend turned into one signifying idle, backbiting talk,” and how that act of women speaking to each other—often about men, and in a way those men might not like—became punishable by torture and public humiliation, as in the case of the “scold’s bridle.” This torture device, which was used until the early 1800s, was a mask with a bit (sometimes lined with spikes) that kept a woman from moving her tongue. Gossips, like witches, were criminalized for being women. Federici is always timely: Today’s “whisper networks,” in which women share the identities of abusers and harassers to keep each other safe, are gossip too. And, as accused rapist Stephen Elliott’s lawsuit against Moira Donegan and the Shitty Media Men list proves, plenty of men still want gossips hauled into court.

In other spots, I’m less convinced. Federici spends lots of time analyzing contemporary African witch-hunting in the context of globalism. Though she is deeply invested in African politics, I wished she had spent more time exploring the differences between Medieval Europe and present-day Africa.

The concept of “witch,” or evil magic user, varies by culture. A Ghanaian man, a Navajo woman and a white Evangelical preacher in Louisiana will all define “witchcraft” differently. Federici often seems to be exporting to Africa the European medieval template—wherein witches are women who supposedly gained their powers by having sex with Satan and eating babies, and whose threat was inherently tied to “deviant,” independent female sexuality—to a cultural context that does not quite fit it.

I don’t doubt Federici when she says that African witch-killings come from the same sources as medieval panics: capitalism, an influx of fundamentalist Christianity, the need to seize land by eliminating its owners. But the differences do matter. In parts of Central and West Africa, the prototypical accused witch is not an old woman (as in Europe) but a child, often the child of a recently divorced or widowed parent. There is something vital to be said about how capitalism cruelly eliminates children who strain their community’s resources, and by treating “witch hunts” as one unified cross-cultural phenomenon, the chance is lost.

These are quibbles about a book that I suspect readers will love regardless. The point of reading Federici is not to agree with her at all times—it’s to let her knock the dust and cobwebs out of your mind, to open up new roads of thought and spark new curiosities. Opening this book at random will always bring you to a sentence that does that, as when Federici explains why witches are commonly old: “Older women [can] no longer provide children or sexual services and, therefore, appear to be a drain on the creation of wealth”; or ties witches to other historical insurrections: “the portrayal of women’s earthly challenges to the power structures as a demonic conspiracy is a phenomenon that has played out over and over in history down to our times” (Witches was published a few weeks before a Catholic exorcist held a special mass to protect accused sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh from … witches). Each sentence will also open doors into her other work. This is not the Federici book to end with, but it may be the one to pick up when you’re ready to start.

]]>Sady DoyleThu, 31 Jan 2019 19:25:00 +0000How the Demonization of “Gossip” Is Used to Break Women’s Solidarityhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21707/the-subversive-feminist-power-of-gossip/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21707/the-subversive-feminist-power-of-gossip/The following is an excerpt from Silvia Federici's book, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women.

Tracing the history of the words frequently used to define and degrade women is a necessary step if we are to understand how gender oppression functions and reproduces itself. The history of ‘gossip’ is emblematic in this context. Through it we can follow two centuries of attacks on women at the dawn of modern England, when a term commonly indicating a close female friend turned into one signifying idle, backbiting talk, that is, talk potentially sowing discord, the opposite of the solidarity that female friendship implies and generates. Attaching a denigrating meaning to the term indicating friendship among women served to destroy the female sociality that had prevailed in the Middle Ages, when most of the activities women performed were of a collective nature and, in the lower classes at least, women formed a tight-knit community that was the source of a strength unmatched in the modern era.

Traces of the use of the word are frequent in the literature of the period. Deriving from the Old English terms God and sibb (akin), ‘gossip’ originally meant ‘godparent,’ one who stands in a spiritual relation to the child to be baptized. In time, however, the term was used with a broader meaning. In early modern England the word ‘gossip’ referred to companions in childbirth not limited to the midwife. It also became a term for women friends, with no necessary derogatory connotations. In either case, it had strong emotional connotations. We recognize it when we see the word in action, denoting the ties that bound women in premodern English society.

We find a particular example of this connotation in a mystery play of the Chester Cycle, suggesting that ‘gossip’ was a term of strong attachment. Mystery plays were the product of guild members, who by creating and financing these representations tried to boost their social standing as part of the local power structure. Thus, they were committed to upholding expected forms of behavior and satirizing those to be condemned. They were critical of strong, independent women, and especially of their relations to their husbands, to whom—the accusation went—they preferred their friends. As Thomas Wright reports in A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages (1862), they frequently depicted them as conducting a separate life, often “assembling with their ‘gossips’ in public taverns to drink and amuse themselves.”

Thus, in one of the mystery plays of the Chester Cycle representing Noah urging people and animals to enter the ark, the wife is shown sitting in the tavern with her ‘gossips’ and refusing to leave when the husband calls for her, even as the waters are rising, “unless she is allowed to take her gossips with her.” These, as reported by Wright, are the words that she was made to utter by the (clearly disapproving) mystery’s author:

Yes, Sir, set up your sail,
And row forth with evil hail,
for without fail,
I will not out of this town,
But I have my gossips, everyone,
One foot further I will not go.
They will not drown, by St. John

And I may save their lives!
They love me full well, by Christ!
But you let them into your boat,
Otherwise row now where you like
And get yourself a new wife.

In the play the scene ends with a physical fight in which the wife beats the husband.

“The tavern,” Wright points out, “was the resort of women of the middle and lower orders who assembled there to drink and gossip.” He adds: “The meetings of gossips in taverns form the subjects of many of the popular songs of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, both in England and France.” As an example, he cites a song, possibly from the middle of the fifteenth century, that describes one of these meetings. The women here, “having met accidentally,” decide to go “where the wine is best,” two by two to not attract attention and be detected by their husbands. Once arrived, they praise the wine and complain about their marital situations. Then they go home, by different streets, “telling their husbands that they had been to church.”

The literature of mysteries and morality plays belongs to a period of transition in which women still maintained a considerable degree of social power, but their social position in urban areas was increasingly under threat, as the guilds (that sponsored the production of the plays) were beginning to exclude them from their ranks and institute new boundaries between the home and public space. Not surprisingly, then, women in them were often chastised and represented as quarrelsome, aggressive, and ready to give battle to their husbands. Typical of this trend was the representation of the ‘battle for the breeches,’ where the woman appeared as the dominatrix—whipping her husband, straddling across his back, in a reversal of roles clearly intended to shame men for allowing their wives to be ‘on the top.’

These satirical representations, expressions of a growing misogynous sentiment, were instrumental to the politics of the guilds that were striving to become exclusively male preserves. But the representation of women as strong, self-asserting figures also captured the nature of the gender relations of the time, for neither in rural nor urban areas were women dependent on men for their survival; they had their own activities and shared much of their lives and work with other women. Women cooperated with each other in every aspect of their life. They sewed, washed their clothes, and gave birth surrounded by other women, with men rigorously excluded from the chamber of the delivering one. Their legal status reflected this greater autonomy. In Italy in the fourteenth century they could still go independently to court to denounce a man if he assaulted or molested them.

By the sixteenth century, however, women’s social position had begun to deteriorate, satire giving way to what without exaggeration can be described as a war on women, especially of the lower classes, reflected in the increasing number of attacks on women as ‘scolds’ and domineering wives and of witchcraft accusations. Along with this development, we begin to see a change in the meaning of gossip, increasingly designating a woman engaging in idle talk.

The traditional meaning lingered on. In 1602, when Samuel Rowlands wrote Tis Merrie When Gossips Meete, a satirical piece describing three London women spending hours in a tavern talking about men and marriages, the word was still used to signify female friendships, implying that “women could create their social networks and their own social space” and stand up to male authority. But as the century progressed the word’s negative connotation became the prevalent one. As mentioned, this transformation went hand in hand with the strengthening patriarchal authority in the family and women’s exclusion from the crafts and guilds, which, combined with the process of enclosures, led to a “feminization of poverty.” With the consolidation of the family and male authority within it, representing the power of the state with regard to wives and children, and with the loss of access to former means of livelihood both women’s power and female friendships were undermined.

Thus, while in the Late Middle Ages a wife could still be represented as standing up to her husband and even coming to blows with him, by the end of the sixteenth century she could be severely punished for any demonstration of independence and any criticism she made against him. Obedience—as the literature of the time constantly stressed—was a wife’s first duty, enforced by the Church, the law, public opinion, and ultimately by the cruel punishments that were introduced against the ‘scolds,’ like the ‘scold’s bridle,’ also called the ‘branks,’ a sadistic contraption made of metal and leather that would tear the woman’s tongue if she attempted to talk. This was an iron framework that enclosed the woman’s head.

A bridle bit about two inches long and one inch wide projected into the mouth and pressed down on top of the tongue; frequently it was studded with spikes so that if the offender moved her tongue it inflicted pain and made speaking impossible.

First recorded in Scotland in 1567, this torture instrument was designed as a punishment for women of the lower classes deemed ‘nags’ or ‘scolds’ or riotous, who were often suspected of witchcraft. Wives who were seen as witches, shrews, and scolds were also forced to wear it locked onto their heads.15 It was often called the ‘gossip bridle,’ testifying to the change in the meaning of the term. With such a frame locking their heads and mouth, those accused could be led through town in a cruel public humiliation that must have terrified all women, showing what one could expect if she did not remain subservient. Significantly, in the United States, it was used to control slaves, in Virginia until the eighteenth century.

Another torture to which assertive/rebellious women were subjected was the ‘cucking stool,’ or ‘ducking stool,’ also used as a punishment for prostitutes and for women taking part in anti-enclosure riots. This was a sort of chair to which a woman was tied and “seated to be ducked in a pond or river.” According to D.E. Underdown, “after 1560 evidence of its adoption begins to multiply.”

Women were also brought to court and fined for ‘scolding,’ while priests in their sermons thundered against their tongues. Wives especially were expected to be quiet, “obey their husband without question” and “stand in awe of them.” Above all they were instructed to make their husbands and their homes the centers of their attentions and not spend time at the window or at the door. They were even discouraged from paying too many visits to their families after marriage, and above all from spending time with their female friends. Then, in 1547, “a proclamation was issued forbidding women to meet together to babble and talk” and ordering husbands to “keep their wives in their houses.” Female friendships were one of the targets of the witch hunts, as in the course of the trials accused women were forced under torture to denounce each other, friends turning in friends, daughters turning in their mothers.

It was in this context that ‘gossip’ turned from a word of friendship and affection into a word of denigration and ridicule. Even when used with the older meaning it displayed new connotations, referring in the late sixteenth century to an informal group of women who enforced socially acceptable behavior by means of private censure or public rituals, suggesting that (as in the case of the midwives) cooperation among women was being put at the service of upholding the social order.

Gossip today designates informal talk, often damaging to those that are its object. It is mostly talk that draws its satisfaction from an irresponsible disparaging of others; it is circulation of information not intended for the public ear but capable of ruining people’s reputations, and it is unequivocally ‘women’s talk.’

It is women who ‘gossip,’ presumably having nothing better to do and having less access to real knowledge and information and a structural inability to construct factually based, rational discourses. Thus, gossip is an integral part of the devaluation of women’s personality and work, especially domestic work, reputedly the ideal terrain on which this practice flourishes.

This conception of ‘gossip,’ as we have seen, emerged in a particular historical context. Viewed from the perspective of other cultural traditions, this ‘idle women’s talk’ would actually appear quite different. In many parts of the world, women have historically been seen as the weavers of memory—those who keep alive the voices of the past and the histories of the communities, who transmit them to the future generations and, in so doing, create a collective identity and profound sense of cohesion. They are also those who hand down acquired knowledges and wisdoms—concerning medical remedies, the problems of the heart, and the understanding of human behavior, starting with that of men. Labeling all this production of knowledge ‘gossip’ is part of the degradation of women—it is a continuation of the demonologists’ construction of the stereotypical woman as prone to malignity, envious of other people’s wealth and power, and ready to lend an ear to the Devil. It is in this way that women have been silenced and to this day excluded from many places where decisions are taken, deprived of the possibility of defining their own experience, and forced to cope with men’s misogynous or idealized portraits of them. But we are regaining our knowledge. As a woman recently put it in a meeting on the meaning of witchcraft, the magic is: “We know that we know.”

You can read a review of Silvia Federici's book, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women, here.

]]>Silvia FedericiThu, 31 Jan 2019 18:37:00 +0000Does the Super Bowl Feel Too Political? Thank American Militarism.http://inthesetimes.com/article/21706/superbowl-military-thank-troops-colin-kaepernick-sports-political/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21706/superbowl-military-thank-troops-colin-kaepernick-sports-political/Super Bowl season is like the holidays — a celebration shared by people more accustomed to arguing than sitting down together. As one of the few transpartisan, mass media events left to our tribal culture, the biggest TV night of the year can’t help but channel the political tensions most of us endure all year long.

This year, pop superstar Rihanna turned town the Super Bowl halftime show, citing the NFL’s crackdown on protests against racial discrimination. For the same reason, comedian Amy Schumer publicly swore off doing any commercials.

Meanwhile, advertisers fret that running any ads at all could be read as a statement one way or the other. (Last year, Budweiser faced boycott calls for an ad merely mentioning that one of its founders was an immigrant.)

It’s a normal thing to want a break from arguing. But in a politicized environment, even shutting up is a political act.

In fact, professional football has been deeply politicized for years. Maybe you didn’t notice before Colin Kaepernick took a knee, but the fact that one guy on one knee sparked a national firestorm highlights the politics of the stage he acted on.

It wasn’t until 2009, for example, that NFL players were even required to leave the locker room for the national anthem, much less stand for it.

That year, the Pentagon was gearing up for a major troop surge in the Afghan war, which even 10 years ago was already old, unpopular, and largely forgotten. It needed recruits, and it needed a compliant public.

So where did it look? To sports fans. A Senate investigation revealed that the military dumped tens of millions of dollars into the NFL and other leagues for PR help. This accelerated a post-9/11 trend of increasingly patriotic — and martial — displays at football games.

“Consider the display put on at Super Bowl 50,” recalls writer Stephen Beale for The American Conservative: “A flyover by the Blue Angels fighter jets, and 50 representatives of all military branches singing ‘America the Beautiful’ against a backdrop of a giant flag.”

Some even speculate that the NFL’s national anthem rules were bought by that Pentagon money. Either way, warfighters are now honored at virtually every sporting event. A visitor from elsewhere might wonder what all this has to do with moving a ball around.

Make no mistake — even “non-political” celebrations of veterans are deliberately political. William Astore, a 20-year Air Force vet, has written that the “post-9/11 drive to get an America public to ‘thank’ the troops endlessly for their service in distant conflicts” amounts to “stifling criticism of those wars by linking it to ingratitude.”

Astore quotes the late Norman Mailer, who warned during the Iraq War that “the complete investiture of the flag with mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascistic atmosphere.” (How prescient that seems now that the president himself sets out to punish political speech on the field.)

It was only in this atmosphere that a simple, silent protest against police brutality and racism could be construed as an attack on “our troops” — as opposed to, say, police brutality or racism. Despite this thoroughly political staging, it was only Kaepernick and his supporters who were attacked for “bringing politics” into football.

The conditioning was so deep that even real-life veterans coming out in support of the quarterback were unable to prevent him from being demonized and blackballed. (In fact, it was veteran Nate Boyer who advised Kaepernick to take a knee in the first place.) Small wonder that rich celebrities and advertisers now have to grapple with it, too.

That’s no comfort to the beleaguered football fan (or their friend who just watches for the commercials). But even if nobody deigns to kneel during the anthem, and even if advertisers and halftime performers play it safe and boring, you aren’t being spared politics. You’re swimming in it.

Somewhere outside that billionaire-owned, taxpayer-funded stadium (hey, that’s political too), your neighbors are living with poverty, racism, and violence. Farther afield, thousands of troops remain mired in countless forgotten battlefields, while innocent people abroad endure another year of war.

Everything we do that affects each other is political — and few acts are more deceptively political than telling the affected people to pipe down.

]]>Peter CertoWed, 30 Jan 2019 18:43:00 +0000Will AMLO Respond to the Central American Exodus With Compassion—Or Militarization?http://inthesetimes.com/article/21704/amlo-central-american-exodus-immigration-marshall-plan-trump-border-wall/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21704/amlo-central-american-exodus-immigration-marshall-plan-trump-border-wall/As thousands of Central Americans continued to join an exodus headed toward Mexico and the United States, government officials from the region met in San Salvador on January 15 to discuss the details of a foreign assistance plan Mexico ambitiously claims will address the root causes of migration by funding job-creation and poverty-reduction in Central America and southern Mexico.

Following the example of the Marshall Plan for European reconstruction in the wake of World War II, the government of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is calling for the investment of some $30 billion over five years to stimulate economic development in the region. While details remain unclear, the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras signed a joint declaration with Mexico last month to kick off talks to define the initiative, formally called the Comprehensive Development Plan. Mexico has asked the United States to pitch in, though so far the commitment has been paltry.

Under the original Marshall Plan, officially called the European Recovery Program, the United States pumped nearly $13 billion into western Europe between 1948 and 1951. The goal was to reconstruct European nations devastated by World War II, liberalize trade and contain communism in the early years of the Cold War. Noam Chomsky has argued that the plan was crafted to serve U.S. corporate interests and laid the groundwork for the rise of transnational corporations, though it did contribute to Europe’s recovery. Alongside the economic agenda, covert CIA operations, financed with 5 percent of Marshall Plan funds, used a “a network of false fronts” to undermine socialist and communist labor unions and other social organizations.

As part of his call for a Marshall Plan for Central America, López Obrador, known as AMLO, has proposed prioritizing development over security in the region, signaling that sustainable development in Central America is tied to that of Mexico. Mexico says the plan aims to combat the drivers of migration in a “comprehensive way” as part of a broader effort to ease “restrictive” immigration policy to improve conditions for Central Americans in transit. Meanwhile, security remains the top pillar in the U.S. State Department’s strategy for Central America, under which new funding to the region will fall.

Endorsing the agreement between Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean says the plan has the potential to “change the paradigm of migration, development and cooperation” in the region.

But critics argue that while the situations in the Northern Triangle are indeed dire and require urgent attention, the plan will likely follow in the footsteps of other regional U.S.-backed initiatives that have failed to effectively tackle the underlying causes of migration and—instead—prioritized militarization and private profits. Misguided priorities, compounded by weak and corrupt government institutions in the region, have led to a funding model that not only falls short of tackling root causes, but may exacerbate the inequality, displacement and failed anti-violence policies that drive people to flee their homes in their first place.

“Difficult conditions”

Deep institutional crises in the governments of the region—rooted at least in part in unrealized promises of peace and democracy after the end of U.S.-backed civil wars in the region—leaves many wary of regional leaders’ will and ability to effectively administer funds in ways that will benefit populations in need. While the idea of a Marshall Plan for Central America sounds promising, it is unlikely to produce meaningful results without rethinking the ways foreign aid has been allocated and administered, critics say.

“I think it is very difficult in these conditions that any plan could change the situations in our countries,” Ursula Roldan, director of the Institute for Research and Social Projection on Global and Territorial Dynamics at the Rafael Landivar University in Guatemala City, tells In These Times. “First we would have to stabilize the region through deepening the fight against corruption and through more legitimate elections.”

The crises are deep. Guatemala is in the grips of a “slow motion coup” set off by the government’s bid to unilaterally boot a UN-backed anti-corruption commission out of the country. Honduras is still reeling from a 2009 military coup and widely-condemned 2017 presidential election, both tacitly endorsed by the United States and accompanied by widespread political violence. And El Salvador, set to vote for a new president on February 3, remains locked into a 15-year-old “iron fist” clampdown on gangs that has failed to rein in violent crime.

Geoff Thale, vice president of Programs at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), argues it’s time to “fundamentally rethink” foreign aid plans for the region to yield meaningful results.

“In principle, a Marshall Plan for Central America is the right thing,” Thale tells In These Times. “But there’s a long way from saying that it’s a good idea, to figuring out how to actually make it work in a way that generates both development and equity in the region, that is adequate funded, and that is not riddled by corruption and mismanagement in ways that make it ineffective.”

“Government of criminals”

Bartolo Fuentes, a Honduran journalist and former member of Congress, tells In These Times that the southern Mexico development portion of the Marshall Plan could be promising. Fuentes helped get the word out last October about the first big caravan from Honduras, made up of people fleeing violence, political persecution, poverty and unemployment. Contrary to Trump’s rhetoric, he says the idea of the caravan was never to enter the United States en masse or by force, and some 3,000 Central Americans opted to request asylum in southern Mexico.

Fuentes believes that if salaries are decent, employment in Mexico could be an attractive option for some Hondurans seeking economic opportunities. He points to the Mexican government’s Maya Train rail project as one potential source of employment for migrant workers. Indigenous groups in Mexico have rejected the project over the government’s failure to consult their communities, while environmentalist warn of impacts on forests and wildlife habitat in southern states.

But Fuentes argues that investment in Honduras administered by the government of President Juan Orlando Hernández —sworn in for a controversial second term one year ago after a highly questioned presidential election—would be a lost cause. “We have a corrupt government,” he says, rhyming off a raft of underfunded public programs like health and education as well as a slew of high-profile government corruption scandals, including the arrest of the president’s brother in Miami on drug trafficking charges.

“In few words, we need a change of government,” says Fuentes. “This is a government of criminals. As long as those people [remain in power], there will be no plan for prosperity that really works, neither by Mexico nor the United States.”

Doubling down on failed policies

Fuentes’ criticism of the United States references an ongoing regional development initiative ostensibly aimed at stemming migration from the region, the Alliance for Prosperity. Developed under the Obama administration, the Alliance for Prosperity includes plans to build a gas pipeline from Mexico to Central America, expand energy infrastructure and logistics corridors, coordinate border security across the region and attract foreign investment.

Though initially billed as a $1 billion per year plan over five years, the United States has allocated $2.1 billion to the region since 2016. The Northern Triangle governments have allocated $7.7 billion to the Alliance for Prosperity in the same period.

Journalist and author Dawn Paley reported two years ago that the plan, proposed as a solution to the increase in unaccompanied Central American children arriving in the United States, was likely to deepen the refugee crisis because it proposed the same kinds of corporate projects and militarized security that community leaders in the region were fighting to stop. “Far from improving the situation, four years on, we see increased social and environmental conflict, increased militarization, increased polarization, increased poverty and an ongoing mass exodus,” she tells In These Times of the Alliance for Prosperity.

In her book, Drug War Capitalism, Paley argues that the war on drugs in Latin America has provided a pretext for U.S.-backed militarization, which in turn pushes the frontiers of global capitalism by opening up land and resources for foreign investment and extraction. The 18-year-old, $10 billion counter-narcotics and counterinsurgency program Plan Colombia, for example, sold free-market economic reforms and military aid as a package deal. Back in 1998, Colombia’s then-President Andrés Pastrana Arango had called for a kind of Marshall Plan for Colombia. A year later he forged Plan Colombia with then-President Bill Clinton. Plan Colombia utterly failed to curb cocaine production, while the human costs of the war soared. Foreign direct investment hit a high in 2013 at roughly seven times the 2000 level, and investment in mining and oil in particular ballooned exponentially. The Alliance for Prosperity follows a familiar playbook.

“We don't have many specific details about the proposed plan at this point,” Paley says of the new Marshall Plan, “but based on the fact that funding is supposed to come from international financial institutions and private investors as well as the U.S. and Mexican governments, it's unlikely we'll see a departure from the Alliance for Prosperity.” The Inter-American Development Bank facilitated the creation of the Alliance for Prosperity and will continue to be one of the partners with which U.S. support for the Marshall Plan proposes to “work closely,” along with the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and private sector partners such as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

Rights groups and researchers have warned militarized security, paired with development schemes designed to keep riches in the hands of transnational corporations and local elites, often exacerbate conditions that drive people to flee home in the first place.

“One of the things that has continuously failed is investment in security, which means militarization, that doesn’t attend to the longer, historical realities of a region that is completely stratified,” Alex Villalpando, professor of Pan-African Studies and Latin American Studies at California State University Los Angeles, tells In These Times.

Many also have raised concern that U.S. funding for the region continues to support state security forces with track records of human rights abuses and violent repression of social movements. More than 50 members of U.S. Congress, for example, have called for the United States to more rigorously condition foreign aid and loans to Honduras’ police and military in light of rampant impunity for violence against human rights defenders, epitomized by the murder of internationally-renowned indigenous leader Berta Cáceres. In Guatemala, military jeeps the United States donated in the name of the war on drugs were deployed last year to intimidate the anti-corruption commission, The Interceptreported.

For Villalpando, any talk of a Marshall Plan for Central America is shaped by a “racialized logic” in the kind of relationship the United States has with Central America compared to Europe. While the United States saw European countries as "imperial allies" when the Marshall Plan was rolled out after World War II, Washington has long had a paternalistic relationship with Central America, he explains.

“That’s where the idea of a Marshall Plan falls,” Villalpando says. “Central America has been crucial to the U.S.’s development as an empire and as a global capitalist power.”

A sordid history

In response to AMLO’s push for the Central America plan, the United States pledged to pitch in $5.8 billion for Central America, though most of that sum recommits existing funds, with over half coming from private investment guarantees. Washington says the aid proposes to “promote institutional reforms and development” through public and private investment in the name of “promoting a safer and more prosperous Central America.” Private investment guarantees for southern Mexico total $4.8 billion. The Trump administration will ask for just $180 million in new bilateral assistance for the region for 2019.

WOLA’s Thale says the U.S. contribution remains “fictional” at this point. “There’s almost no real new money in the proposal the administration made,” he tells In These Times. “If this is a $30 billion plan, we ought to be contributing a larger share.”

Aquiles Magaña, executive secretary of El Salvador's National Council for the Protection and Development of Migrants and Their Families, believes that the United States has a “historical responsibility” to address structural causes of migration after decades of intervention in the region. Unlike other critics, he tells In These Times that the Alliance for Prosperity and other U.S. socio-economic investments are a step in the right direction. But he also argues that present-day funding doesn’t measure up to the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. economic and military aid that propped up El Salvador’s dictatorship during the country’s 12-year civil war, when Washington also sent military advisors to support the Salvadoran military, suggesting the United States should invest more in regional development.

U.S. history in neighboring Guatemala and Honduras is similarly sordid. In 1954, a CIA-backed coup in Guatemala set the stage for 36 years of brutal civil war and genocide against Maya indigenous peoples. The conflict claimed 200,000 victims mostly at the hands of state forces and aligned death squads. Meanwhile, Honduras served as the Cold War staging ground for U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in the region, and in the 1980s a secret CIA-trained military unit terrorized, tortured and killed at least 184 dissidents to discourage a revolutionary uprising on Honduran soil. In the years after the region’s peace accords, U.S. free trade policies shaped the region’s economies, including undermining local agricultural production by flooding local markets with cheap U.S. imports. In 2009, the Obama administration refused to cut aid to Honduras after the military coup and later endorsed widely boycotted elections that took place under the coup regime. And most recently, the Trump administration appears to be turning a blind eye to constitutional crisis in Guatemala.

“Central America never managed to deepen its democracies,” explains Rafael Landivar University’s Roldan. She says powerful economic interests undermined the transition to democracy and the creation of meaningful public policies after the end of US-backed civil wars.

“Today we have co-opted governments, a business sector with too much power, no checks and balances on the exercise of power, and illicit forces that have controlled judicial and legislative apparatuses,” she says. “What we need is to retake the path of democratic reconstruction in these countries.”

The U.S. administration’s plans to request $180 million in new foreign aid for the Northern Triangle pales in comparison to Trump’s $5.7 billion request to build 234 miles of a “new physical barrier” at the border. Since the announcement of the Central America aid, Trump has focused immigration debate squarely on the wall as the only way to combat what he calls a “crisis” at the southern border.

Critics argue that the only humanitarian crisis is one of the United States’ own making, as artificially slow processing of asylum-seekers left thousands of Central Americans in limbo at the US-Mexico border late last year. Tens of thousands more asylum-seekers living in the United States will be impacted as the government shutdown interrupts immigration court hearings. Meanwhile, deterrence policies—from Obama-era efforts to tighten Mexico’s southern border through Programa Frontera Sur to Trump’s “zero tolerance” policies—continue to show no signs of slowing the Central American exodus.

A new paradigm?

Against the backdrop of the manufactured border crisis and years of misguided U.S. responses to Central American migration, WOLA’s Thale believes it is positive that Mexico is leading the strategy.

But Berenice Valdez Rivera, public policy coordinator with the Institute for Women in Migration, a Mexican social organization, stresses that AMLO should learn from his predecessor’s mistakes and move away from failed solutions of militarized borders and increased immigration policing. Independent of the Marshall Plan for the region, she believes Mexico’s priorities in responding to the Central American exodus in the short term should include simplifying processes for Central Americans to regularize their status in Mexico, reducing immigration patrols, and raising awareness about and facilitating humanitarian visa options.

With thousands of Central Americans on their doorstep, Mexican immigration authorities “will attend to foreigners who arrive in Mexican territory with full respect or their human rights, offering them a humane reception, regularization processes so they can transit the country, as well as information and orientation,” Marissa Gonzalez Ramirez, a spokesperson for Mexico’s National Institute for Migration, told In These Times.

Since the latest large group of Central Americans arrived at its border, Mexican officials have received over 12,000 requests for humanitarian visas, including from 1,897 children and adolescents. About three quarters of applicants are from Honduras. But only a fraction of applicants have received their visas. Mexico’s agreement with the Northern Triangle countries proposes to address all facets of migration from root causes to transit, asylum, and deportation processes. Although these moves appear to be making good on commitments to improve rights of migrants and refugees in transit, Mexico announced it has closed requests for humanitarian visas. Some rights groups also have raised concern about processing times being slower than the five days expected, noting the uncertainty has prompted some Central Americans to carry on without waiting for the visa.

But simultaneously, AMLO has attracted ire for pushing a plan to create a 60,000-strong National Guard. Critics say the force will continue a militarized public security strategy that, far from containing violent crime, has perpetuated violence and human rights abuses since former Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched the “war on drugs” 12 years ago. Lower House lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the plan, which now passes to the Senate. AMLO has called for the final version of the National Guard to include a stronger role for the military. The move does not inspire confidence that AMLO is willing to take a clear step away from militarization.

As Central Americans interested in staying in Mexico have options to request asylum or one-year humanitarian visas, it remains unclear what will happen to refugees seeking asylum in the United States under Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” plan. The policy requires asylum-seekers to wait for their immigration court dates in Mexico, which could take years. Mexico has criticized the policy as “unilateral,” but nevertheless has stated the country will accept asylum seekers returned to Mexican territory. Immigration lawyers and human rights groups slam “Remain in Mexico” as a logistical nightmare that will put vulnerable asylum-seekers at greater risk.

For Valdez Rivera, ensuring humane treatment of migrants and refugees in transit through Mexico as well as effective implementation of a Marshall Plan for the region will require the government to work closely with human rights and social organizations with decades of frontline experience with these communities.

“Development doesn’t work without strengthening institutions,” she says. “The Mexican government needs to be close to civil society organizations in Central America and Mexico."

]]>Heather GiesTue, 29 Jan 2019 19:00:00 +0000This Community Built a Democratically Controlled Water System. Now They Have To Defend It.http://inthesetimes.com/article/21654/el-salvadors-water-system-corrupt-politicians-community/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21654/el-salvadors-water-system-corrupt-politicians-community/Sitting in sagging plastic lawn chairs at their family’s modest farmhouse, Tomás Zúniga and his wife, Fredisvina, remember building their community’s water system two decades ago, a system that supplies thousands of local residents in the municipality of Tacuba in southwestern El Salvador.

Tomás Zúniga, a rail-thin campesino with a pencil mustache and white cowboy hat, says “it was a miracle from God” in a 2018 online video produced by the international humanitarian group Oxfam and the Salvadoran magazine FOCOS. “In the period of one to five months, water was arriving in places where we had never known tap water before.”

But the months of construction through dense jungle terrain, supported by $1.7 million from international aid groups, would prove only the beginning of their trials. In El Salvador, impoverished peasants increasingly find themselves in conflict over water with the likes of Coca-Cola, water-intensive export agriculture, upscale residential developments, and, as in Tacuba, corrupt local governments.

In 2007, Tacuba’s then-mayor, Joel Ramírez Acosta of the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance party (ARENA), seized control of the community water system, installing new valves that allowed him to redirect water to neighborhoods that supported him and ARENA. According to local residents, he reduced water access while doubling water fees to the seven communities that had built the system. In 2016, police arrested Zúniga and the rest of the water system’s democratically elected leaders on charges of stealing the water from the system they had built.

“[Tacuba is] emblematic of the fight for justice in an unequal world,” says Karen Ramírez, who leads community organizing around water issues for the Salvadoran humanitarian group Asociación Pro Vida. “It is the worst case we’ve seen.”

Thanks to local and international pressure, the men were released after a week in jail. Now, nearly two years later (and more than a decade after the system was seized), Tacuba residents are still fighting to regain ownership. Even if they succeed, national developments could overturn any victory.

In spring 2018, ARENA retook control of the country’s national assembly and introduced a bill that would transfer water management to the private sector. Social justice groups, the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front party and the Roman Catholic Church denounced the bill, arguing that it would put water beyond the reach of poor Salvadorans.

After it was introduced in June 2018, the proposal sparked massive street protests, and the country’s Roman Catholic Episcopal Conference sent a communique to the Vatican, pledging, “We will not permit the poor to die of thirst.”

ARENA denies the law would “privatize” water. The World Bank, which activists in El Salvador and elsewhere accuse of pressuring governments to privatize as a condition on its loans, denies this, preferring to discuss “public-private partnerships” (PPPs).

Michael Tiboris, a water fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, says when it comes to water the difference is semantic: The vast majority of so-called privatized water systems have always been PPPs, since private companies rarely build the costly infrastructure. “What private companies want is to manage systems that have already been built, because you can make money on that,” he says.

The proposed water law would create a governing board to regulate water access. ARENA’s critics argue that the party will stack the board with members who would do the bidding of the party’s corporate donors, like La Constancia, a Coca-Cola “bottling partner” that has faced massive protests against its plan to expand its bottling plant—and thus its water use—in Nejapa, a municipality outside San Salvador.

Social movements fear that water privatization will lead to more situations like the one in Tacuba, where impoverished communities end up locked in multiyear struggles with no end in sight.

“To be an advocate or defender of the right to water, as we’re doing, costs dearly,” Fredisvina de Zúniga says in the 2018 Oxfam interview. “You have to go through difficult situations like those that have happened to us.”

]]>Christine MacDonaldTue, 29 Jan 2019 14:00:00 +0000Kamala Harris’ Disturbing Brand of Criminal Justice Reformhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21700/kamala-harris-criminal-justice-reform-mass-incarceration-progress/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21700/kamala-harris-criminal-justice-reform-mass-incarceration-progress/Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) released a new autobiography in January, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, to coincide with her presidential bid. It opens with an awestruck account of her first day as a summer intern with the Alameda County District Attorney's Office. That experience during her final year of law school confirmed her desire to be a prosecutor and propelled her successful campaigns to become San Francisco’s district attorney and then California’s attorney general.

Harris writes of striving to be a “progressive prosecutor,” but her vision is comprised of little more than gauzy invocations to wield the powers of her office “with a sense of fairness, perspective and experience,” to “hold serious criminals accountable,” to foster “safe communities” through crime prevention, and to run a “professional operation.” Harris frequently mentions her willingness to fight the good fight, to bring it on, but the battlefield she portrays is largely devoid of specific political interests, trade-offs and opponents (except for primordial sins such as racism, sexism, homophobia and, of course, the bogeyman of President Donald Trump).

When it comes to policy, Harris sits foursquare in the Washington consensus that congealed around the much-heralded First Step Act of December 2018. Instead of reining in the carceral state, that consensus involves trimming around its edges at best and bolstering its long-term viability at worst.

Now coming under national scrutiny with her presidential bid, Harris’s poor record has been hiding in plain sight for years in California. That record, once one looks past her multicultural coming of age story and her attempts at soaring rhetoric, is risk-adverse and mainstream—much like Barack Obama’s at a comparable point in his political career. She has spent little political capital to curb mass incarceration and, like Obama, her biggest political risks have involved the timing of her electoral decisions to challenge establishment politicians rather than wait her turn to run for higher office.

When Harris was elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003, the problem of mass incarceration was invisible to the wider public. To her credit, she challenged the idea that prosecutors should “incarcerat[e] people for as long as possible, no matter the crime, no matter how much it costs to incarcerate them, and despite the documented fact that our current prison system rarely prevents offenders from committing new crimes when they come back out.” Early in her tenure, she took a courageous stand not to seek the death penalty in the case of a man accused of killing a police officer, and her office was also less likely than many other jurisdictions to deploy California's draconian three-strikes law.

These are early bright spots in what is otherwise a troubling record. A judge excoriated her DA’s office for its “levels of indifference” to defendants’ constitutional rights in its failure to disclose information about a scandal in the crime lab's drug analysis unit that led to the dismissal of 700 cases. A technician had been skimming cocaine and tampering with evidence.

As attorney general, Harris successfully championed legislation to criminalize truancy and punish parents with fines and incarceration. She also sided with Gov. Jerry Brown to stymie implementation of Brown v. Plata, the most consequential prisoners’ rights decision in more than a generation, by repeatedly returning the case to the lower courts. The U.S. Supreme Court had declared that California's grossly overcrowded prisons were unconstitutional and ordered the state to reduce its inmate population. Andrew Cohen of the Brennan Center for Justice characterized these attempts to “weasel out” of the Supreme Court’s ruling as “nothing short of contemptuous.”

In The Truths We Hold, Harris lauds implicit bias training as her weapon of choice to reduce police shootings of people of color. There are much more effective and proven measures, like stricter use-of-force regulations for police departments and mandated independent investigations of shootings—but they are stridently opposed by many police officers and their unions, and Harris has not forcefully advocated them.

Harris has taken similarly troubling positions on many other key criminal justice issues, including the use of solitary confinement, civil asset forfeitures, the criminalization of sex work, and punitive residency and other measures leveled on people convicted of sex offenses. She resisted key efforts to moderate California’s three-strikes law. Harris periodically has touted herself as a fierce opponent of the capital punishment, but as attorney general, she appealed a federal judge's ruling that the state's enforcement of the death penalty was unconstitutional. She continued to come down on the side of the death penalty as the case made its way through the federal courts and took no public position on a 2012 ballot measure to repeal capital punishment in California.

It’s easy to pile on Harris as a would-be reformer who is anything but. The sad reality is that she is in step with a troubling Washington consensus on criminal justice reform. If there were any doubts, just look at the strange career of the First Step Act, which Trump signed into law in December 2018 and CNN commentator Van Jones hailed as a “Christmas miracle.”

The final version of the bill included some modest sentencing reforms that will likely result in the early release of a few thousand of the federal system's 180,000 inmates; it will not affect the release dates of the 2 million people incarcerated in state and local jails. The legislation also promises to expand the use of compassionate release for gravely ill federal prisoners and improve the conditions of confinement for other federal prisoners by, among other things, prohibiting the shackling of pregnant women and the solitary confinement of juveniles.

Leaving aside the sentencing reforms, the Federal Bureau of Prisons already had the broad authority to implement most of these changes through its administrative powers. Indeed, the shackling of pregnant women has been prohibited in the federal system for about a decade.

The First Step Act was first introduced by Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Karen Bass (D-Calif.) in May 2018 and received 16 bipartisan cosponsors, including Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii). The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights wrote a scorching response, signed by dozens of criminal justice reform and civil rights organizations, including the ACLU, urging legislators to vote no due to several “grave concerns," including the act’s centerpiece—a “risk and needs assessment” algorithm that risked “embedding deep racial and class bias” into early-release decisions. They also criticized the bill for fostering the privatization of the criminal justice system and for failing to appropriate any funding for implementation.

Another concern was the bill's focus on providing programming and early release measures targeted at the “non, non, nons”—people convicted of nonviolent, nonserious and non-sexual offenses. The legislation excludes a wide swath of people in federal prison who may have committed serious crimes but who no longer pose serious threats to public safety. There are dozens of exclusions, including people convicted of computer fraud, failure to register as a sex offender, and many categories of assault and possession of a firearm.

Harris and Sen. Cory Booker initially joined the opposition to the bill. In November 2018, however, Booker helped reintroduce a revised version that included new (modest) sentencing reforms. The Leadership Conference and many other advocacy groups (including the ACLU) did an about-face, endorsing the revised legislation even though most of their “grave concerns” were still unaddressed.

The revised bill tweaked the proposed risk-assessment system but left its troubling features intact. The new funding authorized—$75 million annually for five years—was less than miniscule.

Some major criminal justice reform advocates, including Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, remained outspoken opponents. In a prepared statement, JustLeadershipUSA, a leading advocacy group for formerly incarcerated people, denounced the measure: “We must avoid further situations like the First Step Act and any type of incremental reform that helps the few and sets up harm for the many. We could not endorse this bill because it contains what Michelle Alexander has aptly termed the Newest Jim Crow—harmful technology and an expansion of the carceral state that will disproportionately impact Black and brown people’s freedom.” Vivian D. Nixon, a leading national voice among formerly incarcerated people, said in a statement, “It’s tempting to support this bill on the merits of its effort to improve the conditions of confinement. But these improvements mean little if they come at the expense of freedom for this and future generations.”

The hoopla surrounding the Washington consensus that has brought together Democrats and the ACLU with the Koch brothers on the issue of criminal justice reform is overblown. It has been self-servingly promoted, especially by the Kochs’ political and public policy machine, as the one bright spot in an otherwise dysfunctional capital. As the criminal justice gaze was fixed on this alleged bipartisan miracle, William Barr, a champion of hardline penal policies when he was President George H.W. Bush’s attorney general, was poised to return as President Trump's next attorney general.

The hoopla also draws attention away from the major advances toward reform happening at the local level. A new generation of prosecutors is willing to take on the Fraternal Order of Police and the statewide associations of district attorneys and sheriffs—some of the biggest obstacles to real criminal justice reform. And powerful local coalitions are emerging to make sure that those like Harris, who aspire to be “progressive prosecutors,” do not pull back once they are elected to office.

]]>Marie GottschalkFri, 25 Jan 2019 20:00:00 +0000Why Far-Right Presidents Trump and Bolsonaro Are Backing the Attempted Venezuelan Couphttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21698/donald-trump-jair-bolsonaro-venzuela-coup-nicolas-maduro-hugo-chavez/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21698/donald-trump-jair-bolsonaro-venzuela-coup-nicolas-maduro-hugo-chavez/Venezuela is facing its most serious political crisis in years. The United States and Brazil—both headed by far-right presidents—are helping to push the country to the brink.

On Wednesday, the head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, declared himself the country’s interim president before thousands of supporters. In a clear sign of coordinated action, U.S. president Donald Trump quickly recognized Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, along with Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Argentina and most of the Lima Group, a multilateral body that includes Canada and a dozen largely conservative Latin American countries.

The problem is that Venezuela already has a president. Nicolas Maduro was sworn in for a second term earlier this month, after winning a reelection vote last year. Because of low voter turnout and an opposition boycott, the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United States called the last election invalid.

After the United States recognized Guaidó on Wednesday, Maduro broke off diplomatic relations and ordered the withdrawal of all U.S. personnel within 72 hours. Guaidó called for them to remain. In an unprecedented move, the United States is set to defy the order and keep the embassy open.

“The United States will take appropriate actions to hold accountable anyone who endangers the safety and security of our mission and its personnel,” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo toldCNN. The Trump administration has refused to rule out military intervention, and announced Wednesday that “all options are on the table.”

Brazil’s Bolsonaro: "fighting communism”

The level of the current political crisis in Venezuela would have been hard to imagine only a few years ago during the Pink Tide era, when regional blocs of progressive governments promised to back each country’s self-determination against coup threats and U.S. destabilization.

Brazil’s left-wing Workers Party governments — which governed from 2003 through 2016 — backed the region’s progressive left and vocally supported Venezuela, among other radical countries. Right-wing congresses still pushed through U.S.-backed coups in Honduras, Paraguay and Brazil. But the threat of U.S. military intervention in the region was largely off the table. Not anymore.

Since the 2016 impeachment of Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff, in a move that was considered by many to be a congressional coup, U.S.-Brazilian relations have warmed. Under Brazil’s new president, far-right former military captain Jair Bolsonaro, the ties have grown even tighter. Trump and Bolsonaro have traded accolades over Twitter. Trump’s top security official John Bolton met with Bolsonaro at his home in Rio de Janeiro in November, where they discussed Venezuela, among other things. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attended Bolsonaro’s inauguration in Brasilia.

The call to replace Maduro has become a rallying cry for the Latin American right. When Argentine president Mauricio Macri visited Bolsonaro last week, Venezuela was high on the agenda, just after discussions of their commercial ties.

More than 10 days before Guaidó declared himself president, the Brazilian government under Bolsonaro had already issued a statement recognizing Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate ruler. Guaidó spoke with Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, himself a congressional representative, and thanked them for the support.

High-profile opposition Venezuelans who are living abroad traveled to Brazil last week and met with president Bolsonaro and Justice Minister Sergio Moro — the judge who convicted and jailed former president Luiz Inacio Lula a Silva on flimsy evidence.

Bolsonaro has multiple reasons to want to push hard against Maduro. Like Trump, the new Brazilian president stands to gain support for the harsh stance on Venezuela. As anachronistic as it may sound — 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall — Bolsonaro waged a substantial portion of his electoral campaign last year on the fight against communism. “Today is the day that the people begin to free themselves from socialism,” Bolsonaro said during his inaugural address on January 1.

Bolsonaro pinned the communist threat on Brazil’s Workers Party, which he and his supporters blame for everything from corruption to the financial crisis and even youth pornography. But for Bolsonaro, Venezuela is the kingpin of evil — a specter he prophesied would happen in Brazil, if the left returned to power.

U.S. Security Official John Bolton took it yet to another level, elevating Venezuela, along with Cuba and Nicaragua, to members of what he called called the “Troika of Tyranny.” Bolton said in early November, “This Troika of Tyranny, this triangle of terror stretching from Havana to Caracas to Managua, is the cause of immense human suffering, the impetus of enormous regional instability, and the genesis of a sordid cradle of communism in the Western Hemisphere.”

Under Bolsonaro, Brazil is willing to do whatever necessary to back the United States and strengthen its hand in the region. The two countries have even discussed the possibility of a U.S. base on Brazilian soil, although Brazil’s military has long been reluctant to hand over Brazilian sovereignty to the United States or any foreign country.

Brazil is a powerful country in the region: Its military, while dwarfed by the United States, is by far the largest in Latin America, with over 330,000 active military personnel, and more than 1.6 million individuals in the reserve.

Brazilian Vice President Hamilton Mourão, himself a former army general, told the press on Wednesday that Brazil would not participate in any future military intervention in Venezuela. Bolsonaro, however, has previously said that nothing was off the table—and so has the United States.

United States: Flexing Its Muscles

For several months, Trump has been floating the idea of a possible military intervention. Now, with most of the countries in the region closing ranks behind it, and the Guaidó-forced political crisis in full swing, the United States, may be looking for an excuse to act.

This is not the first time the United States has tried to influence Venezuelan politics. For the last 20 years — since the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998 — the United States has backed many opposition attempts to overthrow the Venezuelan government, be it by supporting the oil lockout, the opposition’s boycotting of elections and the 2002 coup. The U.S. State Department has propped up numerous opposition groups with millions of dollars, through the National Endowment for Democracy and other U.S. government-funded organizations.

There is much at stake with this latest coup attempt. Venezuela is home to the largest oil reserves in the world. Though production is down from earlier years, the South American country still produces roughly 1.4 million barrels of crude oil a day, shipping more than a third of it to refineries in the United States.

Venezuela has long funneled oil revenues into social programs for the country’s poor, lifting millions from poverty and raising standards of living. It led the charge to reorganize OPEC, unite the Latin American left and stand up to the United States.

“Venezuela is not just an outlier in political terms in the region now, but it is a country that represents a real threat to the right regionally, to the extent that if they recover economically, if oil prices go up again, it can become once again a regional powerhouse as it was under Chavez,” Alex Main, from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said on Wednesday. “So, I think what’s going on, in part, is a real fear that Venezuela could make a comeback, so to speak.”

Of course, Venezuela is, and has been, in turmoil for many years. Inflation is through the roof, many food items are scarce and products hard to find. The crisis has led to a mass exodus of Venezuelans, with thousands attempting to leave across borders to neighboring countries. The Maduro government has not been effective at combatting the multiple layers of problems. But it has also faced tough U.S. sanctions and an internal economic war that has impeded its ability to function.

Guaidó’s self-proclamation, in coordination with U.S.-backed international interests, is pushing the country to the edge—and dangerously fueling tensions. The high command of Venezuela’s military reaffirmed its support for Maduro as the country’s legitimate president on Thursday. Russia, China, Iran, Mexico, Uruguay and Cuba have all recognized Maduro as Venezuelan president. In particular, on Thursday, Russia warned the United States against intervening in Venezuela, saying it would trigger a “catastrophe.”

As many have observed, decades of bloody invasions and U.S.-backed coups have taught us that regime change always ends badly. In the case of Venezuela, it could lead to civil war and a complete destabilization of the region.